Long Island
Colm Tóibín
Picador, 2024
Brooklyn, published in 2009, sees central character Eilis Lacey leave 1950s Ireland for a new life in America, propelled by the tragic and unforeseen death of her beloved sister, Rose. Long Island takes up Eilis’ story 20 years later, where she has made a life on Long Island with her Italian husband Tony, his brothers, parents and their two teenage children. She has not visited her friends and family in Ireland since she abruptly left without telling them that she had married Tony in a registry office in New York. Eilis has ambiguous feelings about her Irish home and family, writing to her mother regularly but also not feeling entirely accepted by American society and Tony’s family.
Despite some niggling feelings of discontent, Eilis’ life is reasonably settled until the arrival of a stranger who tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s baby and that the baby is not welcome in his family. This catalyses Eilis’ reconsideration of her marriage, as she also does not wish to raise her husband’s baby. Her mother’s 80th birthday is approaching, so Eilis decides to take her children to meet their Irish grandmother for the first time and to think about whether she will return to America when the baby is born. Eilis also left behind her boyfriend Jim, who has never married but has begun a secret relationship with her teenage friend Nancy, and Jim and Nancy were preparing to announce their engagement before Eilis arrives to once again make Jim question who he really loves and who he wants to spend his life with.
Long Island is a beautifully written and engaging novel about the ways in which people sublimate their true desires for duty and how the secrets and demands of family work themselves out over the course of lifetimes.
