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Colm Tóibín is the award-winning author of six novels, including The Story of the Night, The Bhckwater Ughtship, and The Heather Blading. The Master (2004), his novel based on the life of Henry James, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year Award in 2005 and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. His novel Brooklyn, related to James's The Portrait of a Lady, was long listed for the Man Booker and won the Costa Novel Award in 2009. His collection of stories, The Empty Family, appeared in 2010. His nonfiction works include Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, and, most recently, Love in a Dark Time. In 2004, his first play, Beauty in a Broken Phce, was produced in the Abbey Theatre in Tóibín's hometown, Dublin, and in 2011 his second play, Testament, premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival.
Since 2002 Tóibín has been engaged with Henry James in various forms as he has produced several introductions, reviews, talks, and essays relating to James. Tóibín identifies with James since they are both Irish, gay, single, social, and literary. The volume All a Novelist Needs, edited by Susan M. Griffin, brings together Tóibín's nonfiction pieces and explores the relationship Tóibín the author and the man has to Henry James the author and the man. In a talk about his new novel on Radio Open Source, he comments on his general interest in James:
The James thing was interesting to me, too, in that James dealt with dramatizations of secrecy and of people having things they keep to themselves and that, if known, will be explosive .... And I was in that dramatic power of withholding, which is something I think I have learned a lot about from James - in his own life and perhaps more so in his fiction. (Lydon2009)
Scenes of people having secrets, managing information, manipulating the understanding of others, and the dramatic power of the distribution of knowledge in human relations constitute the basic topics by Henry James the author.
Yet, in Tóibin's understanding, "James's work demands attention to the scenes and situations of writing" (Griffin x);...