The Blackwater Lightship A Novel

It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother, Lily, and her grandmother, Dora have come together to tend to Helen's brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. With Declan's two friends, the six of them are forced to plumb the shoals of their own histories and to come to terms with each other.Shortlisted for the Booker Prize,The Blackwater Lightshipis a deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn an untimely death. In spare, luminous prose, Colm Toibin explores the nature of love and the complex emotions inside a family at war with itself. Hailed as "a genuine work of art"(Chicago Tribune),this is a novel about the capacity of stories to heal the deepest wounds.

Colm Tóibín is the recipient of the The New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship and the E. M. Forster Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Dublin.