Published in April 2024 - (Call now to reserve your copy of Long Island - The Lane will notify you via text once it's in stock📚)

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.