Colm Toibin’s novella, A Long Winter, was first published in 2005 by a small press, then included in a collection, and has now been re-published in hardcover by Picador. Such maneuvers usually make me skeptical. A large publisher, waiting for new work from their famous author, fills the gap by putting out overpriced hardcovers of early or minor work. It is hardly a new ploy, but I need not have worried in this instance. Diehard fans of Toibin’s work, like me, will enjoy A Long Winter, though it never quite reaches the heights of his later novels.

The story is set in a small, isolated village high in the Spanish Pyrenees. This is a place of smallholdings and land owned and worked for generations by poor farmers. A place where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where both friendships and enmities run deep. Miquel lives here with his mother and father. His much loved brother, Jordi, has just left for military service. On a cold, snowy day, Miquel’s mother, after a bitter confrontation with her husband and son, leaves the small farmhouse and never returns.

A Long Winter is a poignant story about loss, loneliness, and love. What is best? To have known love and to endure the pain of losing someone, or to be alone and never experience such loss? Toibin is a brilliantly subtle observer of human behavior and conveys so much feeling with so few words. If he occasionally falls into the trap, as he does here, of trying to do a little too much, it hardly matters because the results are still so powerful and affecting.