Gabi's Review

In Colm Toibin’s new novel Long Island, we rejoin Eilis, the central character of his earlier novel Brooklyn. Long Island is set in the 1970s, twenty years after the events in Brooklyn, and is focused on Eilis’s comfortable life in the New York City suburbs with her husband Tony and their two children. She is also a much-loved member of an extended, supportive Italian family, as well as happy in her job as an accountant. But when a stranger delivers shocking news about her husband, Eilis entertains the possibility of a return to Ireland, a country she believed she had left permanently behind.

Although Long Island explores a new phase in Eilis's life, it deals with similar concerns about women’s lives and identities in the same simple but emotionally resonant language. And like Brooklyn, it captures the everyday, even humdrum experiences and rhythms of family life, while also suggesting hidden treacheries that threaten to implode the calm domestic surface. The ending leaves characters’ futures intriguingly unresolved, inviting the possibility of another book to complete a trilogy. Eilis is a seemingly straightforward character whose complexities have gradually been revealed in these two novels; I eagerly anticipate where Toibin might take her next.

Publisher's Review 

A novel of enormous wit and profound emotional resonance from one of the world's finest writers. Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighbouring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony's parents. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no-one to rely on in this still-new country. One day, an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but will leave it with her. Eilis has choices to make, and what she does in the wake of this shattering news is at the heart of one of Tóibín's most riveting and emotional novels to date. 

Praise for Long Island 

'A masterful novel full of longing and regret ... Intensely moving and yet full of restraint' Douglas Stuart 'His best yet ... It reads like the tensest of stage plays, but with all the pleasures of interiority that the novel form allows. I haven't wanted to hug this many characters in a while' - Naoise Dolan