Long Island
By Colm Tobin
Published 2024
Read Feb 2026
This book is Tobin’s sequel to Brooklyn, published in 2009 about an Irish immigrant, Eilis, who comes from a small town in Ireland. This reader read Brooklyn before she started this website so there is not an essay on that book at this site, but suffice it to say that interesting character-driven book prompted this reader to read the follow-up.
This reader agrees with others that it’s not necessary to have read Brooklyn before reading this book, but this reader is glad she had read Brooklyn first as it provides some insights on a number of the characters and one feels you are rejoining their story, twenty years after you left them. Additionally, Tobin throws in some characters from Nora Webster, a novel he published in 2014 that this reader discussed previously.
In Brooklyn, Eilis meets her future husband, Tony, an Italian American, when he comes to a dance in the Irish section of Brooklyn. Their courtship is sweet and quick before they marry and get ready to pursue Tony’s dreams for them. Eilis returned to Ireland for a visit shortly after her wedding and kept her marriage a secret during that visit.
This book, set in 1976, twenty some years later, finds Eilis, Tony, and their nearly grown children living in a house in the family compound in Long Island. Tony and his brothers are all in a contracting business together. We find out in chapter one that one of Tony’s jobs afforded him an affair with a married woman. That woman’s husband learns she is pregnant with Tony’s child, and he delivers this information to Eilis on her doorstep and the vow that he will drop the child off on same doorstep when he/she is born as he won’t have the child in his house. So right out of the gate we have the setting for an interesting story of how this situation will be addressed. Eilis takes advantage of her mother’s 80th birthday to leave Long Island for her hometown in Ireland to let the situation brew so to speak.
Most of the rest of the book takes place in Ireland as Eilis interacts with her mother, siblings, old friends, and most significantly, the man who had courted the (secretly) married Eilis in Brooklyn when she visited Ireland in that book. For a little extra pizzaz, this man is secretly engaged to Eilis’s old best friend.
All of this adds up to the possibility of a book filled with “drama” between all the parts and pieces. In fact, this reader paused reading this book for quite a while because of this possibility. However, upon returning to the book this reader learned that Tobin fortunately keeps the level of “drama” down pretty well and allows most of the focus on the difficult situation Eilis finds herself and how she responds to it, as well as how the other characters respond to her visit. Recall this is 1976 and the culture of Italian American and Irish immigrants and village Ireland is not the same as 2026 culture. As usual for Tobin, his focus is not so much on moving the plot along as in exploring the characters’ feelings about what’s happening.
Readers of Brooklyn won’t be taken by surprise by the ending of Long Island although they may not be happy about it. You’ll need to read this recommended book to learn what this means.
