Colm Tóibín doesn't approve of sequels. So fans of his novel "Brooklyn" will be happy that after nearly 15 years he has "overcome these misgivings" to write the follow-up, "Long Island", said Lisa Allardice in The Guardian.
"Brooklyn", the "best-known and loved of Tóibín's 10 novels" took the "fairytale of New York" – Eilis, an Irish girl who emigrates to America in the 1950s – and turned it into a "heartbreaking story of homesickness and regret".
In "Long Island", Eilis, now in her 40s, returns to 1970s Ireland and "the possibility of rekindling the romance she left behind all those years ago". Although most of the book is set in Enniscorthy, County Wexford – "where Tóibín grew up and where half his novels are set" – it opens in Long Island. Eilis lives here with her husband, Tony, and their two children, until a "knock at the door changes everything".
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An angry stranger accuses Tony of sleeping with his wife, who is now pregnant, and he says that once the baby is born, he will leave it on Eilis's doorstep. Tóibín is a "master of silence and shadows", said Allardice: "his subjects are abandonment, loss and denial – the things not said, the feelings not acted on".
Anyone familiar with Tóibín's previous work will know he is "fascinated by secrets and the people who hold them in", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. In this book, "secrets litter the characters' paths like landmines".
After her husband's affair comes to light, craving "time alone, to think", Eilis returns to Ireland "under the guise of visiting her ailing mother", said the i news site. She finds her home town, which "had grown rose-tinted in her imagination", is full of the life and loves she left behind, and "each conveys to her intimations of the life she might have lived had she stayed".
"Long Island" is a "wistful novel, heavy with longing", which poses the relatable question: "What if…?" What Eilis decides, and how she reaches her decision, is "relayed here with great sensitivity, but also a tension to rival any thriller".
It is "more suspenseful and gripping" than "Brooklyn", said Thomas-Corr. The final 50 pages "build to a nail-biting conclusion" and it also "feels more morally and psychologically meaty".
It is an "unexpected last-act development", said Megan Nolan in The Telegraph. It "upends you" with the "gripping drama of life, action, movement, and on the same page, the magic of witnessing multiple silent consciousnesses circling one another".
