Review by Booklist Review
Eilis and Tony, first introduced in Tóibín's acclaimed best-seller Brooklyn (2009), have now been married 20 years. The routines of domesticity, parenthood, and Sunday dinners with the surrounding Fiorello clan in Lindenhurst, Long Island, have suddenly brought them to middle age. Their brilliant daughter Rosella is preparing for college, and son Larry is finishing high school. This picture of domestic sanguinity is disrupted when a man arrives and informs Eilis that Tony has impregnated the man's wife and that the baby will be handed over to Tony to raise. Eilis objects but meets resistance from Tony and his family. Since Eilis' mother will soon be celebrating her eightieth birthday, Eilis uses the opportunity to return to Ireland for the first time in two decades and, hopefully, clear her head. As Eilis gets settled back in Enniscorthy, she renews her friendship with the now widowed Nancy Sheridan and wonders about Jim Farrell, her fling of years ago. Tóibín writes with unparalleled fluidity and grace. Each character is intricately drawn with psychological acuity, emerging as fully, almost achingly human. Tóibín is a philosopher of the soul. He understands the complex emotions, the dreams, fear, doubt, and hope that drive human activity. Eilis is complicated, fearless, and compelling, much like her brilliant creator.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers will be thrilled by Tóibín's return to the story of Irish immigrant Eilis Lacey.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The quietly devastating sequel to Brooklyn picks up two decades later with Eilis Lacey, now in her 40s, hemmed in by her overbearing in-laws on Long Island in 1976. First Eilis discovers that her husband, Tony, has been unfaithful, then she learns his family has decided without her consent to raise the child of his illicit affair. Furious, Eilis returns to Enniscorthy, the small town in Ireland she left in the 1950s, and arranges for her and Tony's teenaged daughter and son to join her there to celebrate her mother's birthday. Eilis hasn't been back since the death of her sister, Rose, many years earlier. On that trip, though she was already married to Tony without her family's knowledge, she fell in love with pub owner Jim Farrell. Jim has never married but is soon to become engaged to the widow Nancy Sheridan, Eilis's dear old friend. Now, Eilis's second homecoming upends life in the village as she and Nancy each stumble toward what they believe they deserve, and Jim considers what's more important: his commitments or his desires. Tóibín is brilliant at tallying the weight of what goes unsaid between people ("They could do everything except say out loud what it was they were thinking"), and at using quotidian situations to illuminate longing as a universal and often-inescapable aspect of the human condition. Tóibín's mastery is on full display here. Agent: Peter Straus, RCW Literary. (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work. At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time--headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she'd fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín's 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis' seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife--now pregnant--and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. "She'd known men like this in Ireland," Tóibín writes. "Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house." This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit--or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis' motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father's pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he's become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: "Something had happened to her in America," Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation--and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis' fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton--the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s. A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
