Long Island by Colm Toibin - 2024 - 304 Pages

 Long Island by Colm Toibin - 2024 - 304 Pages

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * “Stunning.” —People * “Dazzling yet devastating...Tóibín is simply one of the world’s best living literary writers.” —The Boston Globe * “Momentous and hugely affecting.” —The Wall Street Journal *

From the beloved, critically acclaimed, bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving novel featuring Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work in twenty years.

Long Island is the 16th work by Colm Toibin upon which I have posted.

Long Island is a sequel to his novel Brooklyn.   Brooklyn is set in the 1950s.  It is about a young Irish woman, Eilis, who moves from rural Ireland to Brooklyn in hopes of  making a better life.

Eilis gets a job working in a big store and lives in a boarding house owned by an Irish woman and all of the other tenants are Irish women also. 

Eilis meets a man, a kind decent one but he Italian, not Irish. She goes to night school. Brooklyn is very much about the immigrant experience. It is about longing for home and the consequences of emigration on those who are left behind.  

Long Island jumps ahead twenty years.  Eilis Lacey is, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, 

A man arrives at her door one day with such shocking news that Ellis feels a need to go back to Ireland to get away from her husband. 

The occasion is the 80th birthday of her mother. She takes her two teenage children with her.  

Lacy reconnects with her best friend and an old flame who owns a popular pub.

COLM TÓIBÍN is the author of eleven novels, including The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was also awarded the Bodley Medal and the Würth Prize for European Literature. SimonandSchuster.com