Colm Tóibín

"The Magician opens at the turn of the twentieth century in a provincial German city where the young boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative, conventional father and a Brazilian mother, exotic and unpredictable, who will never fit in. He hides both his artistic aspirations and his homosexual desires from this father, and his sexuality from everyone. He longs for the charismatic, beautiful, rich, cultured young Jewish man, but marries his twin...

A collection of short fiction includes "The Street, " in which Pakistani workers in Barcelona pursue a taboo affair; and "Two Women, " in which a taciturn Irish set designer confronts repressed emotions while working in her homeland.

"A wide variety of poems, ranging in setting and topic, Vinegar Hill deals with gay experience and with the experience of loss, with memory and a fading past as well as the present moment"--

A provocative imagining of the later years of the mother of Jesus finds her living a solitary existence in Ephesus years after her son's crucifixion and struggling with guilt, anger, and feelings that her son is not the son of God and that His sacrifice was not for a worthy cause.

In Argentina, Anglo teacher Richard Garay is recruited as a spy by the Americans and gradually comes to the conclusion he has sold his soul. A study of homosexuality in a country which disapproves of it and a look at what it meant to be of English origin at the time of the 1982 war between England and Argentina. By the author of The Heather Blazing.