About the book
A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island. In that moment, everything changes.
This stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother.
Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?
Why we love it
Long Island is Colm Tóibín's long-awaited sequel to Brooklyn and is set 20 years later, continuing the story of Ellis, now a mother of two and living on Long Island with her husband Tony.
It's important to clarify upfront that Long Island definitely works as a complete standalone novel within itself and you don't need to have read Brooklyn first in order to enjoy or appreciate it.
We meet Ellis when she discovers her husband has not only been having an affair, but has fathered a child with someone else. It's a moment that understandably turns Ellis' world upside down, causing her to question her choices and the life she's built for herself and her children.
So she does what anyone would be tempted to do in the circumstances and retreats home, back to Ireland, her mother and to all the people she once knew.
But as anyone who's ever moved away from home knows, you can never truly go back. Places and people change in your absence. Revisiting old memories and old loves sometimes just means reopening old hurts and old uncertainties.
It's this aspect which I think makes Long Island work so well as a standalone novel. We don't need to know what experiences Ellis had as a young woman to appreciate what she's going through right now. That feeling of having your life turned upside down in a single moment, to wonder if you made the wrong choices and lived the wrong life, is an entirely relatable one.
Despite the initial bombshell at the start of the book, this is a deceptively quiet novel. Colm Tóibín's skill lies in capturing the things which go unsaid, the inner hesitations we have in revealing what we truly think or feel. Small moments between the characters are infused with profound meaning, drawn more from the absence of action or words than from anything explicitly expressed.
These are flawed characters who make mistakes, who misunderstand each other and are hopeless at communication. If you met them in person, you'd be strongly inclined to give them a good shake and yet somehow that's what makes the novel all the more relatable.
If you’ve read Brooklyn, you’ll be curious to see where the characters ended up.
But if you haven’t, you’ll still appreciate Long Island for what it is - a poignant story of a woman revisiting her past and grappling with the question of whether to return to the familiar or to embrace the unknown and move forward.
Either way, this is a must-read novel from a must-read author.
