Enniscorthy

Home was some graves where my dead lay outside the town of Enniscorthy, just off the Dublin Road.

The Empty Family Colm Tóibín 2011

It was a crisp early winter day, and he was surprised, as he always was when he visited Enniscorthy, by the volume of traffic and the new roundabouts and the tiny scale of things that, when he was growing up, had seemed to him like monuments.

The Empty Family Colm Tóibín 2011

“And she was wise to come home to Enniscorthy after all the years, to be among her own in the town,” Noeleen continued.

The Empty Family Colm Tóibín 2011

She gave him a list of residences for the elderly in the Enniscorthy area; she refused to recommend one over another.

The Empty Family Colm Tóibín 2011

He did not know that his mother had come home to Enniscorthy and was living on the Ross Road.

The Empty Family Colm Tóibín 2011

It was a crisp early winter day, and he was surprised, as he always was when he visited Enniscorthy, by the volume of traffic and the new roundabouts and the tiny scale of things that, when he was growing up, had seemed to him like monuments.

The Empty Family Colm Tóibín 2011

In the title story, an Irishman who has been living in San Francisco, driving "out to Point Reyes every Saturday so I could miss home", returns to County Wexford, where "home was not merely this house I am in now or this landscape of endings … home was some graves where my dead lay outside the town of Enniscorthy, just off the Dublin Road".

The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín Thomas Jones 2010

When a death in the family summons her back to Enniscorthy, she has to make an apparently impossible choice between two places, both – and therefore neither – of which she thinks of as home.

The Empty Family by Colm Tóibín Thomas Jones 2010

Home was some graves where my dead lay outside the town of Enniscorthy, just off the Dublin Road.

The Empty Family Colm Tóibín 2011

Once, when he had supper with an old boyfriend who asked about Josie and seemed to want to hear about the nursing home and the empty house in the town, Paul came close to confiding that his mother, as far as he knew, after an absence of many years, was now living in Enniscorthy as well.

The Empty Family Colm Tóibín 2011