Long Island

A Novel

De: Colm Toibin

Narrado por: Jessie Buckley

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK * Named a Most Anticipated Book by The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, Good Housekeeping, and more.

From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis’ life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.

©2024 Colm Toibin (P)2024 McClelland & Stewart

Reseñas de la Crítica

“A brilliant, compelling and utterly human story. . . . Long Island is at once about freedom, a longing for it and its costs, and the eventual responsibility that conditions and limits it. This decades-later sequel is a natural and fitting second act after Brooklyn.”—Globe and Mail

“You don't have to have read Brooklyn to enjoy the many pleasures of Long Island. It is a masterful novel full of longing and regret. A tale of lovers reconnecting, of compromise, and the settling that can come later in life. Intensely moving and yet full of restraint, I was sad to turn the final page.”—Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain

“Heartbreak, wistfulness, cracking dialogue . . . This is Tóibín at his best."—The Times

No Emotions

A good book allows me to get inside the characters’ heads but the author never said, no matter what happened, how the characters actually felt. I found that very unsatisfying. Also I found the ending a cop out.