Belfast Book Festival. Reading

It is the honour of this year's Festival to have the award winning author Colm Tóibín join us on our first night.
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in 1955. In his latest New Ways to Kill Your Mother Colm
Tóibín reveals an artist 'alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish' and one profoundly tormented by his
sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father or Thomas Mann and his children or J.M. Synge and his mother, Tóibín examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications.

In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel
to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Tóibín illuminates
not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also articulates, with a rare tenderness
and wit, the great joy of reading their work.

An evening not to be missed.