Long Island
-
-
4.1 • 21 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
When an Irishman knocks on Eilis Fiorello's door on Long Island, the news he brings looks set to jeopardize the stability of the family life she and her husband Tony have built together. The arrival of this stranger will send Eilis back to Ireland and to the people she had left behind twenty years earlier. Did she make the wrong choice leaving? Is it too late now to take a different path?
Praise for Long Island
'Wonderful' Elizabeth Strout
'Intensely moving' Douglas Stuart
'Magnificent' The Times
'The work of a writer at the height of his considerable powers, a story of ordinary lives that contains multitudes' The Guardian
'Eilis from Brooklyn is thoroughly grownup now. She's such a living creation: distinctive, guarded, forceful, watchful' The Observer
'Tóibín dramatizes secrecy and its consequences better than almost any other contemporary novelist' The Sunday Times
'Colm Tóibín's rich talents as a novelist need no further enumerating. You just have to read everything he writes' The New Statesman
'Heartbreaking, wistfulness, cracking dialogue . . . This is Tóibín at his best' The Times
'In Long Island, Colm Tóibín has finally given us a follow-up to Brooklyn . . . I read it in one sitting, thrilled to be back with the characters that captivated me last time' The Observer
'An entrancing follow-up to Brooklyn, a moving coming-of-age story and a portrait of the plucky immigrants who fuelled America's post-war boom' The Economist
'Somehow Tóibín makes a book like this - sparely written, elliptical, ambiguous - as immersive as the richly
detailed biographical novels that he has written in recent years. He is a magician' TLS
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.