Five Star Book: Long Island by Colm Tóibín

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I posted this Insta story 4 days ago, and although there was a time in my life that finishing a novel in a weekend would not have been remarkable, it has not been the case lately, so I felt like it was time to revive this dormant series to tell you all to go read Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, immediately.

Well, some of you should go read Brooklyn first, if you haven’t already (and how jealous I am of you getting that experience for the first time). As, very long time readers may recall, Tóibín is one of my favorite living writers, and the character at the center of Brooklyn – arguably his most famous book – Eilish Lacy (played expertly by Saoirse Ronan in the film adaptation) is one of my all time favorite fictional characters. (This may surprise some people who have read Brookyln, because she is famously reticent and sleep walks through large portions of that story, but her inner monologue is so alive and when she does make choices they are achingly relatable.)

So, when I read at the beginning of the year that a long threatened sequel was coming this Spring I was equal parts overjoyed (I pre-ordered it so early that by the time it arrived at Left Bank Books I had forgotten what I ordered) and terrified. Does something perfect need to be followed up? The ending of the first novel is abrupt and open-ended, in a way that I always felt as an invitation to imagine your own future for the characters, did I want to know the ending that Tóibín had thought up?

The answer was yes, of course. The situation that sets Long Island in motion, twenty years after the ending of Brooklyn, is not the future I wanted for Eilish necessarily, but it forces our still reticent to act heroine into the center of her own story again, and I loved getting to spend time there with her. Despite it’s geographic title, much of the new novel takes place back in Ireland, in the village with Eilish grew up, and deals with the different struggles of those who left and those who stayed, very beautifully. The conflicts here are all quiet, domestic ones, but I still found myself gasping and exclaiming as these people who have lived in my head for so long kept living lives outside my imagination.

A sequel this good to a book as great as the original is such a rare gift, and I hope you all love it as much as I do.

Petitioning to get the original cast together for a sequel to the film as well in 10ish years

And just for fun…here are all the books I gave 5 stars on Goodreads without writing a blog post since, 2021, when I could last be bothered.

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