This weekend I started reading a book that my mother gave me for my birthday: Colm Toibin's Mothers and Sons, a collection of short stories. I'd never read anything by him before, and neither had my mother. But of course, given my circumstances, she found the title compelling.

So far I've read all but the final story in the book, and I have to say: I'm amazed. These are remarkable pieces, elegantly constructed, and tonally reserved, and also deeply distressing. Each story's mother-son bond is very different; sometimes nearly incidental, sometimes a key element of the plot--but always it vibrates into the story, rather like the plucking of a string into a room. This is the best collection I've read since Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock.