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Long Island (Eilis Lacey Series)
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Original price was: $28.00.$14.99Current price is: $14.99.
Detailed description:
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).
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Product group:
Categories: Best Books of 2024 So Far
Product name:
Long Island (Eilis Lacey Series)
Price:
Original price was: $28.00.$14.99Current price is: $14.99.
Amazon Customer –
Excellent novel taking the reader on life journey of Eilis Lacey 20 years after she married and moved to Long Island in the first novel, “Brooklyn.” The plot was very exciting and unpredictable.
However keeping track of the all the conversations and personalities in Ireland was a bit long winded and confusing. Perhaps it could have been cut shorter.
I wished for a different ending but a thoughtful reader can imagine the character’s karma and road blocks ahead. I hope there is a series 3 in the Eilis Lacey books. I highly recommend this book.
Wendy –
i read brooklyn loved it. then 9 years later i read long island and loved it.i however did not like the way it ended. it was reading the middle of the book. real bad ending. not happy. when jim said he is going to ask nancy she will know what to do. and that’s it, does the author planning to write another one or just leave us hanging? this book needs a proper ending.
Sarah Parkes –
Book delivered on time in perfect condition – thank you!
Amazon Customer –
This was a bit of a disappointment for me. Though the characters are rich, the story is disappointing and unfulfilling. Leaving us hanging for the next in the series doesn’t work for the reader in my opinion.
Cliente Amazon –
I could not ask for more.
A mature Eilis looking back at her past and questioning her future twenty years on.
Raven66 –
If you enjoyed reading “Brooklyn”, you will enjoy reading its sequel. It is like meeting a long lost friend again after 20 years. Eilis is now a mature woman and the reader is eager to know how she is coping in the USA and what the future holds in store for her.
But if you didn’t read “Brooklyn”, you may not be so enthusiastic. The story is told in the journalistic style characteristic of Colm Toibin who only once deviates from his principle of neutrality concerning the character of Eilis in part 6. The statement “The thought of herself as suddenly altruistic and concerned only with the welfare of others […] made her smile” clears up all doubts about who Eilis really is. But that, we can accept and even enjoy.
What we could regret however is that the author relies on a few cheap plot tricks and some convenient coincidences to set things in motion. Besides, Colm Toibin once again avoids giving a conclusive resolution to the story. That could mean a sequel to the sequel, and that is good news, … and that will be a real literary challenge. Looking forward to it!
Robert Pugliese –
This is a very good story but I was so disappointed with the ending. There is none! There was no resolution to anything. Not one single issue was resolved. This story screams for a third book to tie up the loose ends and bring closure to all that’s been left undone. One can only hope that the author shares that sentiment.
gerardpeter –
This is a powerful story well-told. Readers of the prequel bought strongly into the characters and found some of their behaviour in Long Island unlikely. Perhaps really they wish that Eilis in particular makes better decisions – but then you would not have a novel.
We meet Eilis settled in America twenty or so years after we left her. Her world is not perfect, but with a dramatic opening the author drops a bomb into it. So, we see her return to Enniscorthy, another summer, where some things have changed and some have not.
What Colm shows so well is how devices and desires clash and converge to produce an outcome that perhaps necessitates, never mind promises, a third edition of this Wexford trilogy.
It is a moving piece of writing, and the author elicits sympathy for each and all. However, readers will take sides, mostly with the heroine of Brooklyn. That is exactly what happens, for better or worse, in real life situations of this kind. Colm Toibin though remains even-handed, seeing events through each of his main characters. He shows how keeping secrets is no more possible in Eilis’s neighbourhood on Long Island than in Enniscorthy and no more to be recommended. There is a narrowness to 1970s Ireland still, but it is changing, while Long Island has cultured its own prejudices.
Too circumscribed to be a great novel but definitely to be recommended.
Sunny Monday –
A beautifully written novel about how we human beings’ lives are shaped by the flaws in our own personalities. The novel picks up Eilis Lacey’s life from the novel Brooklyn twenty years on. She now has two teenagers and lives in a (symbolic?) cul de sac on Long Island with the whole of her Italian family close by. A man appears on her doorstep and tells her that his wife is pregnant by Eilis’s husband and that he is going to dump the baby on Eilis’s doorstep when it is born.. What follows is a fascinating portrait of Irish village life and Eilis’s effect on her old lover Jim’s life when she returns to visit with her children. I found her a closed, unlikeable character lacking warmth. After twenty years she still had not made a single friend in America to whom she can talk. Mr Toibin engages the reader in such a way that, even though Eilis may not be simpatica we need to know how her life will turn out. I really recommend this novel.
switterbug/Betsey Van Horn –
Read the previous book, Brooklyn, or see the movie. That will set you up nicely for where this one starts. Brooklyn, the novel, is short, understated—in fact, it wasn’t until the end that I appreciated it fully. But Long Island? Not just the best of the two books, but a deeply felt surprise. I went into this not expecting much; in fact, I thought it would be a strained sequel. Wow, was I ever wrong! Long Island will make my top ten of the year. These characters do not go away when you close the last page. I’m hoping for a trilogy. But I am not going to give even circumspect clues about how Tóibín ends things. That in itself would be a spoiler.
Long Island takes place twenty years post-Brooklyn, sometime in the 1970s now, and Irish-born Eilis has two teenage children with her husband, Italian American born Tony Fiorello. Tony has made a mess of things just recently (all for the reader to discover in the first few pages), and it is practically impossible for Eilis to think peacefully on her own. She is surrounded here in a cul-de-sac by Tony’s family in several of the houses. Everyone in the family knows everyone’s business, it’s just too much for Eilis right now.
Eilis’s mother and a brother are in Ireland, and have never met her children. She resolves to return home for a long visit, stay several weeks (if not months) before her children fly up to accompany her for their first visit. Of course, there’s drama in the gossipy village of Enniscorthy where Eilis grew up, and ghosts from her past that are living, breathing individuals, are ready to haunt or heat up at every turn. Besides her difficult mother, there’s the man she left behind, Jim Farrell. He runs one of the most popular pubs in town. Has never married.
Most of the novel is set in Ireland, as we follow Eilis and her children. The pace is perfect, never ever a dull moment. The prose reads with the alacrity of a gazelle, sprinting freely, yet fully dimensional in details and the authenticity of human dilemma. It’s real, folks! It’s suspenseful and thrilling, and the stakes just get higher and tighter as the pages turn. Oh, those stakes—a few went almost straight through my heart and bled me out.
Don’t worry—there is nothing melodramatic about this novel—that’s just me with my heart in their teeth. It is just as restrained as it needs to be, while also being fulsome and forthright. You never know what will happen next. The riskier the conduct, the more your own heart will pump and panic in equal measure.
What you have and what you left behind rub up against each other, and Eilis is compelled by unfinished business back in Enniscorthy. Broken bonds lay open and exposed, the harm to all the characters gradually revealed. As Eilis appraises her life and considers her options, she fully grasps the urgency to go back to her past in order to secure her future.
I must add my awe at how Tóibín develops characters with such sublime attention to the minute contradictions in human behavior, and how our outward-facing temperament may be highly interpretive. For example, Jim acts like what we know as *the strong silent type.* Is that why he is fiercely selective with his words? Tentative with weighty actions? Guarded about his life? Well, as quiet and restrained as he is, there is more than one way to interpret his personal style and cautious choices. The ending will blow you away, and that’s all I will say about that.
The author effortlessly crafts his tale, and he never intrudes on the action. Tóibín’s cast run the show—they fluently forward the plot with palpable intimacy. And enigma. For all their transparency, the reader won’t easily pierce the inexorable. The author steps out and lets them at it.
Eilis—the entire cast– continue to carry on in my life. I can’t let them go, they are flawed, unforgettable, human. Eilis especially is inscribed in my personal atlas of eternal literary characters. In the space where truth-in-fiction exists, Eilis Lacey will endure. The story’s spry, subtle, and scintillating style was brilliant. I want another sequel and I rarely say that!
Addendum: Norah Webster makes a cameo appearance. Background color basically. But it made me think about the Lucy Barton/Olive Kitteridge-verse. Tóibín has well established the Eilis Lacy-verse, and I’m a fan of him continuing to explore these nervy characters in both Enniscorthy and Long Island.