Long Island
The long-awaited sequel to Brooklyn
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- €10.99
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
'Heartbreak, wistfulness, cracking dialogue . . . This is Tóibín at his best' - The Times
'A masterful novel full of longing and regret . . . Intensely moving and yet full of restraint' - Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK
Long Island is Colm Tóibín’s masterpiece: an exquisite, exhilarating novel that asks whether it is possible to truly return to the past and renew the great love that seemed gone forever. The sequel to Colm Tóibín's prize-winning, bestselling novel Brooklyn.
A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn - perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future.
And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The tragic beauty of this heartfelt tale reminds us that sometimes it’s the things we don’t do that define us. In 1976, rocked by a scandalous revelation about her American husband, Eilis Lacey returns from Long Island to her hometown of Enniscorthy, Ireland, with her teenaged children. Her long-ago love Jim is still there, still unmarried, and there are still sparks between them—though Eilis’ old friend Nancy is also still there, and totally in love with him. Colm Tóibín’s writing overflows with tenderness and compassion, particularly as his characters contend with life’s hardest knocks. As the perspective shifts among Eilis, Nancy, and Jim, we hear the volumes spoken in the things these three leave unsaid. Long Island takes place two decades after Tóibín’s celebrated historical novel Brooklyn, though you don’t need any knowledge of that book to enjoy this one. This bittersweet story will tug at your heart in a way that’s absolutely worth it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The quietly devastating sequel to Brooklyn picks up two decades later with Eilis Lacey, now in her 40s, hemmed in by her overbearing in-laws on Long Island in 1976. First Eilis discovers that her husband, Tony, has been unfaithful, then she learns his family has decided without her consent to raise the child of his illicit affair. Furious, Eilis returns to Enniscorthy, the small town in Ireland she left in the 1950s, and arranges for her and Tony's teenaged daughter and son to join her there to celebrate her mother's birthday. Eilis hasn't been back since the death of her sister, Rose, many years earlier. On that trip, though she was already married to Tony without her family's knowledge, she fell in love with pub owner Jim Farrell. Jim has never married but is soon to become engaged to the widow Nancy Sheridan, Eilis's dear old friend. Now, Eilis's second homecoming upends life in the village as she and Nancy each stumble toward what they believe they deserve, and Jim considers what's more important: his commitments or his desires. Tóibín is brilliant at tallying the weight of what goes unsaid between people ("They could do everything except say out loud what it was they were thinking"), and at using quotidian situations to illuminate longing as a universal and often-inescapable aspect of the human condition. Tóibín's mastery is on full display here.
