After all the brouhaha about Colm Tóibín’s last novel – from Booker shortlist to Barbican stage via Broadway “blasphemy” – Nora Webster presents a quiet corrective. Three times longer than The Testament of Mary, it examines everything that happens to a woman in the immediate years after bereavement, rather than meditating on all that led up to such loss. But for the earlier novel’s notable cast, one might say Tóibín has now chosen to examine life after death. Though true, such simplification denies the rare refinement of his insight into what casts and pressures female identity, central to which is a preoccupation with the complexity of a mother’s love, both closely allied to a Woolfean interest in women’s inner l