A SIMON & SCHUSTER SPECIAL

A SIMON & SCHUSTER SPECIAL

Norman Warwick selects a book from the Latest S&S

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OPRAH´S BOOK CLUB PICK recently named a Most Anticipated Book by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Good Housekeeping, AARP, and more.

From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author, Colm Toibin, 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.

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Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

Praise for Long Island

“I was captivated. A wonderful page-turner to start your summer reading.” 

Oprah Winfrey

“Eilis is an interesting and vivid character because she manages to make her destiny her choice… In her own mind, and in the eyes of sympathetic readers, she is free.” 

New York Times Book Review

“Stunning.” —People

“Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.”

 Los Angeles Times

              
“Momentous and hugely affecting. These pendant novels, will be the fiction for which this wonderful writer is best remembered.” 

Wall Street Journal

“Tóibín has created a novel not to be missed.” 

 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Rich and doubly suspenseful… Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.” —Los Angeles Times