Collections of short stories, poems and essays, sit on my shelves, happily; but not often read from cover to cover. Like a rich, satisfying Christmas cake, lovingly prepared and respectfully and moderately consumed, such collections are best commenced and enjoyed in small doses.

Colm Tóibín’s new collection of nine short stories, The Empty Family, is, like its title, quietly evocative and emotionally charged. In the opening story of his previous collected stories (Mothers and Sons, 2003) ‘The Use of Reason’, Tóibín employs the word ‘empty’ 14 times in the first three paragraphs. Frankly, I have no real idea why, other than to hammer home hard an intense sense of isolation or this bloody emptiness he feels, an existential haiku of sorts. Colm Tóibín is too good a writer for us not to ignore this clue. Nine stories, nine Christmas cakes.

Tóibín’s literary landscape floats around his home in Ireland, and Enniscorthy in particular, which he has returned to again and again in his novels and stories. His Ireland is populated with often lonely and complex characters coming to terms with the past and the repercussions of past decisions. Spain is a place of sexual freedom, dark politics; a country haunted, offering the outsider a certain anonymity.

Three of the nine stories are set in Spain, the rest are in Ireland. Characters and narrators return to, or move about, the cities and country. In ‘One Minus One’, the man comes home to his dying mother and her quiet death. Upon returning to America, he realises ‘that it was too late now ... I would not be given a second chance ... I have to tell you this struck me almost with relief.’

In ‘The Empty Family’, another exile moves back to a home he has been sending books and paintings to for years, also from America. He returns for a visit, uncertain of whether he’ll stay. Tóibín’s writing is always infused with a melancholy, its basis no doubt being, as he recently commented in a recent interview, a result of suffering ‘certain hurts in childhood’. Paul in ‘The Colour of Shadows’ is a young gay man who lovingly attends to the final days, in a nursing home, of his aunt (a close friend of Rose Lacey, a character from his novel Brooklyn). Tóibín also returns to that larger-than-life figure of Lady Augusta Gregory, of whom he has written a brief memoir.

The Empty Family is a sad, poignant, melancholic and at times challenging collection of stories. I’ve always enjoyed Tóibín’s clear, open writing, inviting us into his world, laying open his head and heart. As Heather Ingman commented in her review in the Irish Times, ‘for Tóibín’s protagonists, happiness remains fragile even elusive ... savour the silences between the words, there