The News from Dublin: Stories - Colm Tóibín - ★★

AUTHOR: Colm Tóibín

GENRE: Short Story Collection

PUBLICATION DATE: March 31, 2026

RATING: 2.1 stars.

In a Nutshell: A literary short-story collection by the acclaimed Irish writer. Interesting variety of characters and situations. A bit haphazard in plot development. Flat in character development. Bleak. Feels very lengthy because of the slow pacing and meandering structure. Disappointing endings at times. Didn’t work much for me.

This collection comprises nine stories, a few of which have been published before in other publications. The stories are set across multiple countries, Ireland included.

I had grabbed this collection mainly for two reasons. One, I have enjoyed a majority of the literary works written by contemporary Irish writers and want to explore more Irish fiction. Two, I liked one short story written by this author for Amazon Original Stories. (‘The Shortest Day’) However, this collection just wasn’t for me.

For one, the 300 pages seem endless as each story is terribly slow and hence feels fairly lengthy even if it might not be so. The first eight stories take up about 60% of the book, with the final entry being a novella.

I don’t mind lengthy stories as long as they have a clear structure. In this collection, most stories felt like they were meandering in arbitrary directions instead of moving steadily towards a clear end-goal. The haphazard development in a majority of the stories made me struggle to continue reading. I had to push myself to reach the finish line as I kept zoning out. At times, it was even tough to remember where a story began because the ending went somewhere else entirely.

To my disappointment, there is no foreword or author’s note introducing any theme for this collection. The blurb also makes it clear that there’s nothing tying these stories together except for the author. This also affected my experience. When I read collections, I prefer the set to be connected in some way, whether through the genre or a theme. Simply collecting random character-oriented stories in a book doesn’t make the whole thing come together to offer a unified reading experience.

The prose is superlative, no denying that. The description of the places demonstrates the author’s writing skills. The stories have a fair mix of first-person and third-person perspectives, and come through male as well as female characters. So at least there’s no feeling of déjà vu even in the rambling. That said, the dominant mood is of grief and bleakness and the humans are mostly shallow. This didn’t make my journey easy.

As always, I rated the stories individually, but except for the first entry, the stories didn’t click that much for me. The first story, titled ‘The Journey to Galway’, was a five-star reading experience with a brilliant depiction of a mother’s turmoil in the face of a tragedy without going melodramatic. The only other story that came close to the top rating was ‘Summer of ’38’, a good take on the choices one makes in life; I gave this four stars. The rest of the set earned three stars or lower. A couple of the stories (‘A Free Man‘ and ‘A Sum of Money’) would have easily crossed the four star mark had they offered more satisfying endings. The final story, ‘The Catalina Girls’, also had great potential, but by then, I was so gloomy from the depressing stories that the thought of reading 40% of the book just for one story came in the way of my concentration. I might retry this story again in future when I am in better spirits.

I love the cover. It stands out amid the clutter of similar-looking covers.

Overall, this collection didn’t go as well as I hoped it would. I anticipated an enriching set of characters facing complex emotions, but only the first, the second, and to some extent, the last story, delivered on this potential. Had this book been by some other author (of some other nationality), I might even have DNFed it. But I kept hoping for a story that would mirror that magnificent first-story experience and it never happened.

Some authors work better in longer narrations, so I might still try a novel by this author someday. But my curiosity about his short stories ends here.

Those who are of a more literary bent of mind might enjoy this collection better. But without a central theme or genre, I find it tough to figure out which set of readers to recommend this to.

2.1 stars, based on the average of my ratings for each story.

My thanks to Scribner for providing the DRC of “The News from Dublin” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.