Imagine talks to the acclaimed and curiously divided Irish writer Colm Toibin. Loud and affable in person, Toibin writes sombre stories of grief and quiet heartbreak, repeatedly returning to the dark narrative of his own childhood and the complicated relationships between mothers and sons. In the year that his bestselling novel Brooklyn is being adapted for the cinema and The Testament of Mary continues to provoke controversy, Toibin publishes his most poignant and personal novel yet.