Long Island
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4.2 • 19 Ratings
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- $13.99
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.
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.
