Brooklyn
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The Sunday Times Novel of the Year 2009
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, WINNER OF THE BAFTA FOR BEST BRITISH FILM
"The most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman I have read in a long time" Guardian, Books of the Year
Young Eilis Lacey dreams of life beyond the confines of her tiny Irish village, but unlike her beautiful sister, Rose, Eilis' gifts are of a more practical nature: she has a head for numbers, and is a loving and dutiful daughter. Yet her ambition cannot be hidden and soon is noted by the Parish Priest, Father Flood. Via a church contact, he arranges for Eilis to travel to America where a job opportunity has arisen in New York with a reputable "merchant of Italian origin".
Eilis finds lodgings in an eccentric boarding house and ekes out an existence in the cosmopolitan melting pot that is 1950s Brooklyn, impressing her employer, outwitting her landlady, and even falling in love. It seems her dream is truly becoming a reality. But then fate intervenes: a family crisis back home forces Eilis to make a choice between the past and the future, the old world and the new.
Told with a masterful and elegant simplicity, Brooklyn is a sublime Trans-Atlantic coming-of-age story by one of the UK's greatest living writers.
MORE PRAISE FOR BROOKLYN
"A work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment, it could haunt your life" Ali Smith, Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year
"Suffused with humane depth, funny, affecting, deftly plotted . . . a novel of magnificent accomplishment" Peter Kemp, Sunday Times, Novel of the Year
"Brooklyn moved me more than any other book this year" Nicholas Hytner, Observer, Books of the Year
"No book this year gave me greater pleasure" Nell Freudenberger, Financial Times
"Not a sentence or a thought out of place. It takes over as his finest fiction to date" Irish Times
"Remarkable freshness and immediacy ... with a lovely comedic lightness" Daily Mail
"A lovely, thoughtful book ... alive with authentic detail, moved along by the ripples of affection and doubt that shape any life: a novel that offers the reader serious pleasure" Daily Telegraph
"Tremendously moving and powerful" New Statesman
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
We were captivated by Irish author Colm Tóibín’s gentle, bittersweet novel about the immigrant experience. Eilis’ family presses her to leave Ireland and take a chance on a new life in Brooklyn. Tóibín portrays life in ‘50s New York in vivid detail—from boarding houses, parish dances and department stores to Coney Island and baseball. Eilis’ emotional journey is deeply moving. She cycles through homesickness, cautious joy about her blossoming relationship with ambitious Italian boy Tony, and the pain of choosing between her new and old lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
SignatureReviewed by Maureen HowardColm T ib n's engaging new novel, Brooklyn, will not bring to mind the fashionable borough of recent years nor Bed-Stuy beleaguered with the troubles of a Saturday night. T ib n has revived the Brooklyn of an Irish-Catholic parish in the '50s, a setting appropriate to the narrow life of Eilis Lacey. Before Eilis ships out for a decent job in America, her village life is sketched in detail. The shops, pub, the hoity-toity and plainspoken people of Enniscorthy have such appeal on the page, it does seem a shame to leave. But how will we share the girl's longing for home, if home is not a gabby presence in her migr tale? T ib n's maneuvers draw us to the bright girl with a gift for numbers. With a keen eye, Eilis surveys her lonely, steady-on life: her job in the dry goods store, the rules and regulations of her rooming house ladies only. The competitive hustle at the parish dances are so like the ones back home it's something of a wonder I did not give up on the gentle tattle of her story, run a Netflix of the feline power struggle in Claire Booth Luce's The Women. T ib n rescues his homesick shopgirl from narrow concerns, gives her a stop-by at Brooklyn College, a night course in commercial law. Her instructor is Joshua Rosenblum. Buying his book, the shopkeeper informs her, "At least we did that, we got Rosenblum out.""You mean in the war?"His reply when she asks again: "In the holocaust, in the churben."The scene is eerie, falsely na ve. We may accept what a village girl from Ireland, which remained neutral during the war, may not have known, but T ib n's delivery of the racial and ethnic discoveries of a clueless young woman are disconcerting. Eilis wonders if she should write home about the Jews, the Poles, the Italians she encounters, but shouldn't the novelist in pursuing those postwar years in Brooklyn, in the Irish enclave of the generous Father Flood, take the mike? The Irish vets I knew when I came to New York in the early '50s had been to that war; at least two I raised a glass with at the White Horse were from Brooklyn. When the stage is set for the love story, slowly and carefully as befits his serious girl, T ib n is splendidly in control of Eilis's and Tony's courtship. He's Italian, you see, of a poor, caring family. I wanted to cast Brooklyn, with Rosalind Russell perfect for Rose, the sporty elder sister left to her career in Ireland. Can we get Philip Seymour Hoffman into that cassock again? J. Carol Naish, he played homeboy Italian, not the mob. I give away nothing in telling that the possibility of Eilis reclaiming an authentic and spirited life in Ireland turns Brooklyn into a stirring and satisfying moral tale. T ib n, author of The Master, a fine-tuned novel on the lonely last years of Henry James, revisits, diminuendo, the wrenching finale of The Portrait of a Lady. What the future holds for Eilis in America is nothing like Isabel Archer's return to the morally corrupt Osmond. The decent fellow awaits. Will she be doomed to a tract house of the soul on Long Island? I hear John McCormick take the high note alone in the gloaming with the shadows of the past as T ib n's good girl contemplates the lost promise of Brooklyn.Maureen Howard's The Rags of Time, the last season of her quartet of novels based on the four seasons, will be published by Viking in October.
Customer Reviews
A simple and sweet story
A simple, endearing a sweet story that, unexpectantly, was a page-turner. I was surprised that such a simple story could engulf me so entirely.
Brooklyn
Love this book...Read it twice now
Disappointing
Nothing new here.