In the shadow of the giants
The answer must be no, however, in the small pond of literary fiction, which some publishers and academics would have you believe is the whole ocean of prose, Tóibín is a very big fish and, in that context, this new collection of stories is a very fine book indeed.
Tóibín enjoys primacy amongst the cadre of novelists who currently occupy the sub-Banvillian tier of contemporary Irish fiction. He is a serious writer, arguably to a fault, yet one cannot deny the broad-mindedness which he brings to his work. His prose is considered, in every way, and this, his eighth work of fiction, proves to be no exception.
