# Summer Books Special: Novelist, essayist, raconteur Colm Tóibín

An episode of [The Bookshelf](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/499762704), 31 Dec 2025, 52 min.

Audio: https://mediacore-live-production.akamaized.net/audio/02/fk/Z/4j.mp3

Colm Tóibín onstage at the 2025 Sydney Writers Festival with The Bookshelf's Kate Evans — on fiction, fridges, rain, hinges, melodrama, reading, and why he can't write American dialogue so every character he writes has to be Irish (except, of course, when they're Thomas Mann and family). This is a conversation that begins in his hometown of Enniscorthy, site of his novels Nora Webster, The Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn and Long Island — and the site of his memories and overheard conversations — and moves on to his bookshelves, writing, and the story of a tongue. Really.

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