Description

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From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, 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 that lives and works, eats and plays together. 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. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her 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 instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis’ life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.

About the Author

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Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island; 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; The Testament of Mary; 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. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

Praise For…

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Praise for Long Island

“The quiet, moving story is told from the perspectives of different characters, each with a heartbreaking inability to express what they truly desire. Note that you don’t need to have read Brooklyn to enjoy this follow-up.” —AARP

“Quietly devastating… Tóibín is brilliant at tallying the weight of what goes unsaid between people…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.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

“Tóibín writes with unparalleled fluidity and grace. Each character is intricately drawn with psychological acuity, emerging as fully, almost achingly human. Tóibín is a philosopher of the soul. He understands the complex emotions, the dreams, fear, doubt, and hope that drive human activity. Eilis is complicated, fearless, and compelling, much like her brilliant creator. Readers will be thrilled by Tóibín's return to the story of Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey.” —Booklist, STARRED review

“An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work… Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton…the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s. A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.” —Kirkus, STARRED review

"You don't have to have read Brooklyn to enjoy the many pleasures of Long Island. It is a masterful novel full of longing and regret. A tale of lovers reconnecting, of compromise, and the settling that can come later in life. Intensely moving and yet full of restraint, I was sad to turn the final page." —Douglas Stuart, author of Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain

"Colm Tóibín’s new book is his best yet. It kept me rapt all the way back from Mexico; 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, author of Exciting Times and The Happy Couple

Praise for Brooklyn

“Tóibín creates suspense out of the simplest emotions: fear, love and, most poignantly, regret.” —Time

“Eilis' universal struggles with matters of the heart … make this novel … a moving, deeply satisfying read.” —Entertainment Weekly

"[A] triumph… One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations." —USA Today

“A gem of a novel… profound.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“Quietly majestic.” —Claire Messud, The New York Review of Books

“Written with mesmerizing power and skill.” —Richard Eder, Boston Globe

“Colm Tóibín … [is] his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power.” —Floyd Skoot, Los Angeles Times

“A masterly tale… There is not a sentence or a thought out of place…. His finest fiction to date.” —Bernard O’Donoghue, Irish Times

“A classical coming-of-age story, pure, unsensationalized, quietly profound… There are no antagonists in this novel, no psychodramas, no angst. There is only the sound of a young woman slowly and deliberately stepping into herself, learning to make and stand behind her choices, finding herself.” —Pam Houston, O, the Oprah Magazine