The Bridge by Colm Tóibín review – betrayal and survival in the High Pyrenees

Deep sorrow mingles with illicit desire in this potent novella, the follow-up to a 2006 story about an isolated family in the Catalan mountains Twenty years ago, Colm Tóibín published a steadily desolating novella set in the high villages of the Catalan Pyrenees.

A woman walks out of her house and her life, starts along the mountain road and disappears in the snow. Her son Miquel, failing to find her body, waits through the dark months for the thaw. A Long Winter, which appeared in a standalone…