I did not read Brooklyn, which I would recommend doing prior to reading Long Island. You could read Long Island independently but I felt as though I was missing the back story. The book was alright but felt as though it was a filler for a trilogy.

Thanks to Scribner for an advanced copy of Long Island by Colm Tóibín's and to Simon Audio for the advanced audiobook copy. Brooklyn is one of my favorite books so when I saw he was writing a sequel I was very excited!

We find Eilis and Tony twenty years later and is 1976. They have two teenage children and live in a cul-de-sac on Long Island next to all of Tony’s family. Eilis still feels different and hasn't been back to Ireland since that fateful trip home. She's always felt alone surrounded by Tony’s family and when she finds out Tony’s been keeping a huge secret from her, she decides to go home to Ireland for the summer for her mother's 80th birthday.

I love Colm Tóibín's writing. This is a story of family, love and life decisions and how life evolves and changes. I enjoyed seeing Eilis twenty years later. The way he writes such characters and strong emotions is un-matched and this sequel is just as strong as Brooklyn.

I highly recommend reading Brooklyn before Long Island and if it's been a while re-read the last few chapters. I re-listened to the last few chapters of Brooklyn and I'm glad I did.

Long Island comes out on Tuesday - May 7th.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to read Long Island. Toibin has a direct style of writing which took some getting used to for me, in fact I stopped reading Brooklyn because of it. But then I saw the movie and understood why the story is so beloved. Brooklyn matched my grandmother's story so much, it really helped me understand more about going back and forth, which I didn't quite understand before - it's such a big trip, why would they go back and forth? So I really looked forward to Long Island.
This was very different from my grandmother's story but at this point I was used to the writing style and the story drew me in, of course, how could it not since I am a mother? I was so intrigued and interested, I could not put it down. The ending felt abrupt but I know the author's intent is to leave us wanting more, which he accomplished. I hope he is working on the next book now because I can't wait!

Wow! I read this in 24 hours. Could not put it down. The funny thing is I LOVED the book but found almost all of the characters frustrating and incredibly flawed. And I wished they all communicated more rather than manipulated their environment to suit their needs but I think it was reflective of that era. The writing transported me to both Long Island and Ireland. I literally disappeared into the lives of both communities. There is no doubt this will make the NYT List. I will long remember this story and felt sad upon its conclusion.

Long Island is the sequel to Colm Toibin’s wonderful book Brooklyn. I absolutely loved Brooklyn and was anxious to delve into the follow up story of Ellis and her marriage to Tony. Ellis has returned to Ireland after 20 years of being in America. She is escaping a bad situation and had decided to have a long overdue visit with her 80 year old mother.
I was drawn into the story from the very beginning. I love stories about Ireland and the Irish people. Colm Toibin never disappoints me. I have a feeling there will be a third book because of the way Long Island ended. I am already looking forward to that.

Eilis Lacey returns as Toibin continues the story from his beloved novel Brooklyn.

Long Island takes place in the 70s, a full twenty years after the events of Brooklyn [if you haven't read it or seen the movie, stop what you're doing now and catch up!]. Eilis is still married to Tony. They have a teenaged son and daughter, and the story opens with a massive betrayal by Tony. Feeling both constrained and unsupported by Tony's family (they did build their houses that closely together) Eilis heads to Ireland to get away and clear her head, and help celebrate her mother's 80th birthday.

Back in her small village where everybody knows everybody's business, she finds that not much has changed. Her mother is still prickly, gossip is gold, her best friend Nancy and old beau Jim are still in town.

We feel Eilis struggle with not belonging to either America or Ireland. In America she's a foreigner who embarrasses her kids with her accent and different cultural ways (they identify with their Italian cousins), in Ireland she's exotic with her fashionable clothes and chic demeanor.

Toibin illustrates this beautifully. In the descriptions of the towns, the houses, the pubs, the conversations. The dialogue feels real, we're in the characters' heads and understand their motivations. The emotion is understated, impactful.

I couldn't put this one down, and didn't want it to end (did it end, really?). Toibin's a master at capturing the character dynamics, the love, the lies, the truths unsaid. They're so well drawn out that it's hard to fault any of them for their actions (or lack thereof).

More Eilis Lacey please! The ending was barely an ending. We need more.

My thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the ARC.

“Long Island” is a book that pulls you into its world without you really realizing it. I went into the book not knowing what to expect, and finished it wishing I there were more to read.

The writing style of the book is fairly simple, and the author doesn’t spend a lot of time digging into each character’s emotional thoughts or feelings. While reading, I wasn’t sure I liked that because I didn’t think I was forming an attachment to any of them, which for me is a must with books I love. We jump right in the meat of the story from page one, but it took me some time to jive with the storytelling and become invested in what was coming. Again, at points I wasn’t sure I was invested.

And then the ending came…and I was left googling if or when there would be another book. I need to know more, and the fact I have to wait kind of drives me crazy. Without even realizing, I am so invested in what happens next to Eilis and all the other characters, and I think the ease in which that happened is the brilliance of this book.

**Thank you to Scribner, NetGalley and Colm Toibin for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!**

Colm Tóibín’s “Long Island” continues the story of Eilis Lacey, following the quiet masterpiece that was “Brooklyn.” I loved the first novel and after so many years, I was surprised to see a sequel coming out – but I couldn’t wait to read it! While “Brooklyn” was a sweeter, coming-of-age tale, “Long Island” is full of the complexities of Eilis’s life two decades later. Facing marital problems and complicated family dynamics in America, Eilis decides to visit Ireland for the first time in twenty years, forcing her to confront her past and contemplate her future. Tóibín is such a wonderfully subtle writer, and I felt the characters’ feelings and struggles so deeply while reading. Do yourself a favor and read this (and “Brooklyn” too!) – you won’t be disappointed!

4.5. Colm Tolbin is one of my favorite authors. His novels are just beautiful to read. I loved The Master, The Magician, Brooklyn, The Testament of Mary, and Nora Webster, to name a few. His prose is always lovely and concise. His newest novel, Long Island, is a continuation of the story of Eilis Lacey Fiorello., a young Irish woman who comes to New York to find a new life with a better economic future than what she found in post World War II Ireland. Long Island takes us to 1976, where Eilis is living reputedly successfully in Long Island with her husband Tony, and two teenage children, Rosella and Larry. Due to a totally unforeseen event, Eilis’ life takes an unusual turn which brings her back to her home, Enniscorthy Ireland, ostensibly to visit her mother for her 80th birthday, and has her children come, who have never been to Ireland or met Eilis’family, friends or background. A very moving and poignant tale. The characters are very well developed, the prose is masterful, and the story turns on several developments. As much as I liked this book, as others have mentioned in reviews, the ending was too abrupt without any sense of resolution. Perhaps there is a sequel but still a tad too disconcerting for me but certainly opens up a lot of different options and discussion on a resolution. Another well done novel by Mr. Tolbin. Thank you to Netgalley for providing me an advance copy in exchange for a candid and honest review.

Although readers could begin with Colm Toibin’s latest novel, Long Island, I strongly recommend reading Brooklyn (2009) first, for Long Island is the second in the Eilis Lacey series. Instigated by her sister Rose and aided by a parish priest, Eilis Lacey leaves Enniscorthy, Ireland, in the 1950s, ending up in Brooklyn, New York where she marries Tony Fiorello, a plumber from a large Italian family. When Eilis’s sister Rose dies, Eilis returns to Enniscorthy, having never told anyone there that she had married Tony or that she has returned only temporarily. In her mind, she wants to avoid hurting her mother, who has just lost her other daughter. While in Enniscorthy, Eilis becomes romantically involved with Jim Farrell, but returns to Brooklyn and Tony.

With Brooklyn, the stage has been set for Toibin’s Long Island. It is now the mid-70s and Eilis in her forties, living with Tony and their teenage son and daughter on Long Island with Tony’s omnipresent family as close neighbors. Some time ago, Tony and his brothers had successfully started the Long Island construction company first mentioned in the preceding novel, Brooklyn.

Life seems to be going well until a stranger’s sudden appearance on the Fiorello’s doorstep changes everything. The man informs Eilis of his wife’s pregnancy following a repair job that Tony had completed for the couple. Insisting he won’t have a bastard child in his home, the stranger informs Eilis that he will leave the newborn on the Fiorello’s doorstep if necessary. Eilis sees no reason to question the man, a fellow Irishman. Furthermore, she shares his views of the child. Time has come to leave Long Island again, and Eilis plans to return to Enniscorthy for her mother’s eightieth birthday. Her teenagers, who have known only the Fiorello side of the family, accompany her.

As she runs from the present, Eilis must face her own past. Jim Farrell has never married. Although he has become involved with Eilis’s former best friend, Nancy, his heart still belongs to Eilis, who had left him when returning to Brooklyn after her sister Rose’s death. Now Eilis, Jim, and Nancy all have stories to tell.

Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for an advance reader egalley of this second in Colm Toibin’s Eilis Lacey series. Presumably, this isn’t the last. Hopefully, Toibin fans won’t need to wait another fifteen years to learn the rest of the story.

Shared on GoodReads and Barnes and Noble.

If you've never read Colm Toibin I truly don't know what your waiting. He's one of the gretaest writers of our generation. His books are alwsy special and you always think back on them after you read them. His latest is the sequel to Brooklyn but don't worry you fdon't need to read it to understand this book (though it's a terrific book so you should read it!) Anyway, this story is about an Italain family that lives together in the same neighberhood and share all things together. When someone has as affair and get a woman pregnant it all goes sideways for them. The husband of the gilted party threatens to leav the baby at the doorstep after its birth. The woman says no way and wants nothing to do with it. What ensues is all about choices people make and what right you have to live the life you want and not one that is chosen for you. The novel flows along at a pace where you are never bored. I finished the book on a longhaul flight and only put it down to have my meal. The character of Eilis which is the main character is who is Irish is one of those characters that is well developed that you actually feel like her life is walking along the pages. I highly recommend this book and if you don;t belive me Oprah picked it as her most recent book club pick as well as Parnassus book store. If that is not enough to push you to read it I don't know what will. Please read and enjoy a good old fashioned story by a brilliant writer. Thank you to Simion and Schuster for the read along with Netgalley. This also is a perfect book club pick!!

I was excited to read the sequel to Brooklyn, which I enjoyed even though I had problems relating to Eilis, I just didn't understand the way she thinks. After reading Long Island, I now don't understand how any of the main characters think! It's an interesting story, but very slow, and I just can't relate to any of the main characters, who all just seem to let life happen to them. 3-1/2 stars

I received an ARC from the publisher free and gave my honest opinion voluntarily.

Long Island by Colm Toibin is apparently the sequel to Brooklyn, which I have not read, but it really made negligible difference in reading this book. It is a story about a family, but primarily about the woman of the house, Eilis Lacey Fiorello, a middle-aged mother of two teenage children, married to Tony. They live in a house, which she loves, in Lindenhurst, Long Island, on a cul-de-sac which they share with homes of her husband’s two brothers, their families, and his parents. She is relatively happy until one day a man shows up at her door explaining that while Tony was doing a plumbing job he also was bedding the man’s wife, who is now pregnant. He explains that when the child is born he will bring it here as he will not have it in his house. Well, she will not have it in her house, either, and she tells her husband. Soon her mother-in-law is there telling her that she will raise the child. Eilis refuses to see it every day. She has no solution. She makes a decision. She is going to Ireland to see her mother for the woman’s eightieth birthday. When her children hear, they want to come as well.

Eilis is a strong woman in a very difficult position. She is stubborn. She is not rude about it or loud, but she will not have it. Returning to Ireland is challenging. She left things behind there, things that will complicate things for her and for her life. She is complicating their lives as well. There are some moral conundrums in this story. Morals can be viewed as situational, sometimes. There is also personal desire. And the old, “the grass is greener…” thing. It is a complicated and emotional book, although the emotions are largely held in check. Toibin has told a story free of judgement, which is not an easy task. Excellent read. I’ll have to go back and read Brooklyn. Thanks, Colm Toibin!

I was invited to read Long Island by Scribner. All thoughts and opinions are mine. #Netgalley #Scribner #ColmToibin #LongIsland

Long Island was the first book that I have read by Colm Toibin. I did not read the first book in this series, Brooklyn, and I felt that Long Island worked as a stand alone too. There was enough back story throughout the book that I knew what had happened 20 years prior.

Long Island starts with Eilis finding out that her husband has an illegitimate child and the mother's husband is threatening to leave the baby with Eilis and her husband Tony. I enjoyed the family dynamic with Eilis and her Italian husbands family. The close knit family that left her just outside. Due to the news of this baby Eilis decides to go back to Ireland for her mothers 80th birthday. Once there she falls back into life as it was before moving to America. She catches up with her best friend Nancy and even runs into Jim, her lover the last time she was in Ireland.

I felt parts of this book were really slow and i started to skim. There was a lot thrown into the book that I thought didn't pertain to the main story. I am not a big fan of infidelity in books and this one was full of double standards.

Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for an ARC of Long Island by Colm Toibin for an honest review.

Book Review: Long Island
By Colm Toibin

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

It’s been 20 years since Tobin’s best selling Brooklyn hit the book shelves. Like many of you, I wondered what would become of Eilis Lacey once she returned to Tony and her American home in Brooklyn. The sequel, Long Island, picks up when Eilis is forty years old, still married to Tony Fiorelli, has two teenage children, and is working as an accountant for the Fiorelli’s family business. Three generations of the sizable, tight knit Fiorelli family all live, eat, work and play along side one another on a cul de sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island. Eilis while relatively content with her life, finds she is still an outsider in the family, has no one to confide in and is lonely in her marriage. What is missing in her life becomes painfully clear when an angry stranger appears at her home promising to deliver her husband’s baby to her doorstep when it is born in August. The Fiorelli’s stand by Tony and (maybe try “while instead of “and”?) Eilis returns to Ireland to sort out her troubles. She discovers that not much has changed in the 20 plus years since she visited after he sister Rose’s funeral.

Eilis, as do all immigrants, left many things behind; family, a past love, troubles and the possibility of another life. Long Island is about what may have been and what might still be possible. Toibin, in his uncomplicated and quiet prose, deftly and warmly portraits Eilis’s dilemmas, longings, and struggles to discern her own path. I found myself caring about Eilis, and the other main characters. I was invested in their happiness and my emotions rollercoastered in concert with each turn of events. Some readers will be dissatisfied by certain ambiguities, but I appreciated the author’s invitation to consider the possibilities as I found my mind drifting back to characters and actions in the novel long after I turned the last page.

I highly recommend Long Island for fans of Brooklyn, and other quiet examinations of domestic life.

Many thanks to the author Colm Toibin, @ScribnerBooks and @NetGalley for the pleasure of reading this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Fans of Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn will be ecstatic to know that Eilis Lacey’s story is continuing in Long Island.

Brooklyn is the story of Eilis who leaves Ireland for Brooklyn, where she met and married an Italian American, Tony. Soon after their wedding, she returned to Ireland where she met and fell in love with Jim. Knowing she was pregnant, she returned to America and her husband, while brokenhearted Jim remains a bachelor.

Long Island finds Eilis a mother of two, overwhelmed by her husband’s close, intrusive, family. Her life is upended when she learns that Tony had an encounter that resulted in a pregnancy, and the woman’s husband warns that he will leave the baby on Eilis’ doorstep. Eilis is adamant that she will not have the baby in her house, and if Tony and his family keep it, she will not stay with him.

With her mother’s 80th birthday coming, Eilis returns to Ireland to be with her, and to give time for Tony and his family to let her know their decision, and to decide herself what she will do if they keep the baby. The children will later join her to meet their Irish family.

Meanwhile, Jim has been involved with Nancy and they have secretly decided to marry after Nancy’s daughter’s wedding is over.

But seeing each other again, Eilis and Jim realize they still have feelings for each other, and secretly met, finally consummating their relationship. But secrets don’t stay secret, and Nancy and family pressure Eilis and Jim, their choices constrained by many considerations.

Eilis’ life on Long Island and her small Irish town are beautifully realized. She does not feel at home in either place, and both communities intrude into her affairs. There is a profound sense of isolation as Eilis struggles with her choices. Wonderfully, we are also allowed into Nancy’s and Jim’s inner struggles.

The story is a revisiting of Brooklyn with Eilis in the same position of having to decide between Tony and Jim. The novel leaves us in the middle of things, and eager for the third in the series to resolve the open questions.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

There is no one like Colm Toibin and his character Eilis Lacey to somehow, with such elegant character driven writing, keep me up at night, waiting to see what happens. I can't think of too many non thrillers that kept me up but Toibin's Brooklyn and the new sequel Long Island are two that have. I just love how Eilis will surprise me as a reader, I feel she might even surprise the writer a bit, with how her story unfolds, the decision made, and how she somehow seems to always shift into the spaces and situations she is in and yet still remain uniquely herself.
Thank you to Scribner for the review copy, I am such a fan,

The acclaimed Colm Toibin revisits the central characters of his 2009 novel “Brooklyn.” The novel opens in 1976, 25 years from the conclusion of “Brooklyn.” Eilis Lacy is still married to Tony Fiorello and they have two teenage children. Although they live in a suburban enclave with Tony’s sprawling Italian family, the inscrutable Eilis holds herself at a remove. A stranger turns up on Eilis’s doorstep and tells her that Tony “did even a bit more than was in the estimate. Indeed, he came back regularly when he knew that the woman of the house would be there and I would not. And his plumbing is so good that she is to have a baby in August.” Because the stranger was Irish, Eilis believed him when he announced that he intended to leave the infant on her doorstep.

Eilis had no friends to recount the scene at her front door; however, the Fiorello’s were busy determining how to handle the baby’s arrival without Eilis’s input much less her consent. In response to Tony’s betrayal, Eilis returns to her parochial Irish village, Enniscorthy, for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay — she is unclear. Eilis finds the never-married Jim Farrell, with whom she had a romance 20 years prior before returning to America and to Tony, managing his late father’s pub. Unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), Jim has become involved with Eilis’s widowed friend, Nancy Sheridan, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis, with her rented car and her Americanized attitudes, attracts envy and suspicious scrutiny, including from her own mother. She appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. As the story continues, Eilis navigates her renewed connection with Jim and Nancy amidst her marital crisis.

As one would expect of a writer of Toibin’s prodigious skills, he is able to return to characters decades later and write a companion novel that is tender, fresh and moving. He has created an exquisite masterpiece that addresses themes of love, loneliness, betrayal, and loss. Thank you Scribner and Net Galley for an advanced copy of this extraordinary novel.

How do you follow up a perfect book like Brookyln? With a perfect book like Long Island. And what is sure to be another installment coming. The ambiguity, the complicated characters we love to hate but also love, its all there and its perfect again.

BROOKLYN was a memorable novel. I carried the ending with me even after I saw the film.

LONG ISLAND is an equally magical story of how life played out after the ending of BROOKLYN.

I hope there is one more novel about Eilis and one more chance for her to surprise us all.

Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced copy of the book.