Brooklyn - Softcover

Review

"Tóibín ... [is] his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power."--Floyd Skoot, Los Angeles 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

"Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect.... Brooklyn stands comparison with Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady."--The Times Literary Supplement (U.K.)

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

From the Back Cover

'With this elating and humane novel about an Irish girl's emigration to America, Colm Toíbín has produced a masterwork' Sunday Times

It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.

Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

'A lovely, thoughtful book . . . alive with authentic detail, moved along by the ripples of affection and doubt that shape any life: a novel that offers the reader serious pleasure' Daily Telegraph

'Full of sly fun, lovely comic observation and an almost tangible pleasure in storytelling' Observer

'Refreshingly authentic . . . Eilis is so vivid it's difficult to believe she did not actually exist' Financial Times