Long Island, by Colm Tóibín.

An absolutely fabulous, brilliant sequel to his wonderful novel Brooklyn.

Colm Tóibín’s Long Island is the sequel to Brooklyn, a book that I really loved when I read it years ago, and for me, it turned out to be one of the best novels I’ve read all year. I wasn’t even sure Brooklyn needed a sequel. Its ending felt complete in its own bittersweet way. But within a few pages of Long Island, I was completely hooked.

Twenty years have passed since Eilis Lacey left Ireland for America. She is now living on Long Island with her husband Tony Fiorello, their two teenage children, and Tony’s sprawling Italian-American family, who all live clustered together in neighboring houses. Eilis has built a life for herself, but Tóibín makes it clear almost immediately that she has never fully felt at home there. Beneath the surface of routine family life lies loneliness, silence, and unresolved longing.

The novel opens with one of the most memorable first chapters I’ve read in years. A stranger arrives at Eilis’s door to inform her that Tony has gotten his wife pregnant, and that once the baby is born, he plans to leave it on Eilis’s doorstep. It’s a brilliant, gripping setup, but what makes the novel so compelling is not melodrama. Tóibín is too subtle for that. Instead, the power of the book comes from the emotional aftershocks: the silences, the restrained conversations, the things left unsaid, the tension and the repercussions. 

Much of the novel follows Eilis returning to Ireland for the first time in decades, where she reconnects with people and possibilities from her past, including Jim Farrell, the man readers of Brooklyn will remember well. Tóibín handles these reunions beautifully. The emotional tension is almost unbearable at times, yet the prose remains deceptively simple and elegant. He writes with such confidence and restraint that even ordinary conversations feel loaded with meaning.

The ending will frustrate some readers because it leaves important questions unresolved. Oddly enough, I thought that was exactly right. Life rarely offers neat conclusions, and Tóibín understands that better than almost anyone writing today.

You don’t really need to read Brooklyn first before reading this novel, but I think you should, just because it was so fabulous and will introduce you to the characters. You could take a shortcut and watch the movie (with Saoirse Ronan, who was amazing), although it’s best to envision the characters in your own head rather than through a movie. As for me, I have no problem admitting that I desperately hope there’s a third book.