From Brooklyn to Long Island: Book Club reunites with Eilis

Fourteen of us met at Hanami this month to discuss Long Island, the long-awaited sequel to Colm Tóibín’s much-loved novel Brooklyn. Melissa kicked things off with some background on Tóibín himself—highly recommending his other novels The Master and The Magician, which are fictionalised biographies of Henry James and Thomas Mann—before we turned to the book. Most of us had read Brooklyn (which we discussed back in June 2024), so its characters and plot were still fresh in our minds. Interestingly, we learned that Tóibín had once said he certainly wouldn’t write a sequel… clearly something changed.

At the end of Brooklyn, we left Eilis as she returned from Ireland to New York in 1953 to rejoin Tony, her new husband. Long Island picks up twenty years later. Eilis is still married to Tony, now with two teenage children, and living on Long Island, surrounded by Tony’s large Italian family—who, as it turns out, shape almost every aspect of their lives.

The novel opens with a shock: Tony has (apparently rather casually) impregnated one of his customers. Eilis’s reaction is intense, and the various reactions of Tony’s family only add fuel to the fire. She retreats to Ireland, where we’re reunited with familiar faces, including her old admirer, Jim. Once again, she finds herself torn—between Ireland and America, between different social systems, different expectations, almost different centuries. She feels like a different person in each place, and as before, indecision takes hold.

Our discussion was lively and very enjoyable. As with Brooklyn, we admired Tóibín’s beautifully spare, understated writing—so easy to read, yet rich with detail and atmosphere. His descriptions of time and place feel utterly convincing. We had mixed feelings about Eilis herself: while many of us sympathised with the bind she finds herself in, others were frustrated by her inability to make up her mind, especially when it causes confusion and hurt for those around her. Still, we were all completely drawn in and we cared deeply about what would happen to the characters, which is always a strong sign of a good novel.

And then there’s the ending. True to form, Tóibín leaves us on a cliff-hanger—just as he did with Brooklyn. So the question naturally arose: will there be a third book? Most of us hope so. I certainly do.