Colm Toibin’s Long Island is a brilliant, compelling, utterly human story that begs to be read and reflected upon

Colm Toibin’s Long Island is a brilliant, compelling, utterly human story that begs to be read and reflected uponThere’s nothing new about a novel opening with a stranger arriving at the doorstep. As a hook, it works time and again. Maybe it’s because there’s something inherently mysterious about it, at least for a moment, and readers love a good mystery.

This time it’s not just Eilis – now older, married and in crisis – but also her children whose story we follow as their present and future are bound up in the actions of the adults in their lives, of decisions and non-decisions over which they have little to no control to shape them.return, leading with Eilis, but also her husband, Tony. As the story moves from Long Island, N.Y.

Eilis and Tony live beside the latter’s parents and near his two brothers and their families. Soon, Tony’s mother hatches a plan to raise the child, which the stranger threatens to deposit on Eilis’s doorstep upon its birth. Eilis refuses to have anything to do with the child and soon leaves for Ireland, with the children to follow some time later, in search of time and distance from Tony and his ever-present family.

One of Toibin’s great skills as a novelist is his capacity to build several interlocking themes into a story that feels like it could happen to just about anyone.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, in which the protagonists face the era-bound constraints of 1950s Ireland and America, but not yet the more timeless constraints of growing up.

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