Long Island (Oprah's Book Club)

by Colm Tóibín

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We were so, so pleased when we heard that Colm Tóibín was writing a sequel to his beloved novel, Brooklyn. Family secrets and complicated choices drive this exhilarating story that we won't forget.

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.

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. 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, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at work 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 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 and suspenseful.

Long Island is a gorgeous story “about a woman thrashing against the constraints of fate” (Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air). It is “a wonder, rich with yearning and regret” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476785110
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	05/07/2024
Series:	Eilis Lacey Series
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	670
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; 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.

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/04/2024

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. Agent: Peter Straus, RCW Literary. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Long Island

"I was captivated. A wonderful page-turner to start your summer reading.” —Oprah Winfrey

“A brilliant novel. Beautifully crafted... makes for a riveting, wonderful read.” —Elizabeth Strout, The Guardian

“Eilis is an interesting and vivid character because she manages to make her destiny her choice... In her own mind, and in the eyes of sympathetic readers, she is free.” —New York Times Book Review

“Deeply felt but resolutely unsentimental... Tóibín uses masterly restraint to dramatize how lives can be destabilized by desire.” —The New Yorker

“Stunning.” —People

"Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.” —Los Angeles Times

“Momentous and hugely affecting. These pendant novels, will be the fiction for which this wonderful writer is best remembered.” —Wall Street Journal

"Tóibín has created a novel not to be missed.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Rich and doubly suspenseful... Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.” —Los Angeles Times

“Dazzling yet devastating... Tóibín is simply one of the world’s best living literary writers...” —The Boston Globe

"Entrancing... riveting from the first page." —The Economist

“About secrets and dreams and the conflict of desire over duty... Long Island is a wonder, rich with yearning and regret.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Tóibín’s storytelling is rich and full of tension as he explores the complexities of life, the decisions we make, and the consequences that result.” —Glamour

“The quiet, moving story is told from the perspectives of different characters, each with a heartbreaking inability to express what they truly desire.” —AARP

“Fifteen years ago, Colm Tóibín won readers’ hearts with his best-selling novel Brooklyn. Now, with the sequel, Long Island, he just might break them... Tóibín writes beautifully about the struggle between the comfort of the familiar and the hope for something better.” —Columbia Magazine

“Tóibín’s latest sees the return of one of his most beloved heroines from his novel Brooklyn and deftly explores the longings of a woman who finds herself alone in her tilted marriage.” —The Chicago Review of Books

“A close observer of human nature, Tóibín writes with great depth of longing... Often it is what is unsaid, contained in the pauses, that grips the reader’s attention. There is plenty of beauty to savor.” —BookPage

“Quietly devastating... Tóibín is brilliant at tallying the weight of what goes unsaid between people... 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. Eilis is complicated, fearless, and compelling, much like her brilliant creator.” —Booklist, STARRED review

“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. A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.” —Kirkus, STARRED review

From the Publisher

★ 2024-02-03
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.

At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as 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 Reviews