Brooklyn

Description

Winner of the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Colm Tóibín’s internationally bestselling novel is a story of devastating emotional power.

At the centre of Colm Tóibín’s internationally celebrated novel is Eilis Lacey, one among many of her generation who has come of age in 1950s Ireland but cannot find work at home. When she receives a job offer in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country behind, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady’s intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation.
     Slowly, however, the pain of parting and a longing for home are buried beneath the rhythms of her new life—until she begins to realize that she has found a sort of happiness. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love, tragic news summons her back to Ireland, where she unexpectedly finds herself facing an impossible decision.A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
Longlisted for the Booker Prize
Winner of the Costa Book Award

“Every once in a while a book appears to remind us why we love fiction. . . . [Brooklyn is] an enormously absorbing, nuanced read that steeps us in its character’s world—and gradually surprises us with its moral resonance. . . . [Brooklyn] soars in its deeply effective final section.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Quietly majestic. . . . Tóibín can conjure for us [Eilis Lacey’s] trajectories both glimpsed and lived, in their satisfactions and their sadness . . . . A meaningful accomplishment indeed.”
—New York Review of Books

“Tóibín is himself a master . . . of a kind of deep gentleness, even as the darkness falls on his characters. . . . Here is a writer who quietly watches and reports, shocked at nothing, missing nothing.”
—Globe and Mail

“[A] masterly tale. . . . There is not a sentence or a thought out of place.”
—Irish Times

“Brooklyn is Colm Tóibín’s most beautifully executed novel to date. . . . Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect. . . . There is in fact too much sorrow in the world, and Tóibín, better than any of his contemporaries, knows how to capture its timbre in fiction.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations. . . . [A] triumph. . . . In Brooklyn [Tóibín] creates the purest form of fiction, a small world that employs few references to the real world. It transcends time and place. It leaves readers wondering if Eilis is making the right life for herself, the same question we all face.”
—USA TODAY

“Tóibín creates a narrative of remarkable power, writing with aspareness and intensity that give the minutest shadesof feeling immense emotional impact.” 
—The New Yorker

“Tóibín is an immensely gifted and accomplished writer who has covered a remarkable range of subjects . . . so it comes as no surprise that Brooklyn is intelligent and affecting. . . . Tóibín’s prose is graceful but never showy, and his characters are uniformly interesting and believable. As a study of the quest for home and the difficulty of figuring out where it really is, Brooklyn has a universality that goes far beyond the specific details of Eilis’s struggle.”
—Washington Post

“A classical coming-of-age story, pure, unsensationalized, quietly profound.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Tóibín’s tributes to old New York, both in landscape and disposition, beautifully reflect on a time past, but it’s Eilis’s universal struggles with matters of the heart that make this novel such a moving, deeply satisfying read.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“With this elating and humane novel, Colm Tóibín has produced a masterwork.”
—Sunday Times

“Tóibín’s prose is as elegant in its simplicity as it is complex in the emotions it evokes.”
—New York Times Magazine

“A soothing, specific prescription for unquiet thoughts. . . . Colm Toibin, born, like Eilis, in Enniscorthy, is an expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions. . . . Toibin exercises sustained subtlety and touching respect. . . . [He] quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim.” 
—New York Times Book Review

“Tóibín fashions a compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds, unsure almost until the novel’s final page where her obligations and affections truly reside. . . . A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Meticulously crafted prose. . . . An accomplished and at times enigmatic novel. . . . It elicits, in its finest moments, a lingering sense of hope in the possible futures of youthful desire and love in the middle of life’s bleakness.” 
—The Independent

“Engaging. . . . A stirring and satisfying moral tale.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Disarmingly effective and affecting.”
—National Post

“[Tóibín is] a writer whose stylish, elegantly crafted stories of calm surfaces and agitated depths carry genuine urgency. . . . [He is one of] his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power.”
—Los Angeles Times

“A small masterpiece. Deceptively spare, composed with a profound simplicity, Brooklyn explores the experience of exile in a way that resonates far beyond the limits of a tale about an Irish girl’s passage to postwar America and her shy apprehension of first love in a foreign land.”
—The Guardian

“In the way that the best stories of Alice Munro carry the heft of fully realized novels, Brooklyn is as tightly constructed as the finest of short stories. . . . In spare yet delicate prose, Tóibín delineates characters desperately hiding their deepest emotions from each other and from themselves.”
—Montreal Gazette

“A quietly affecting story. . . . We begin to care deeply about Eilis because her feelings of loneliness, insecurity, homesickness and romantic doubt are so meticulously conveyed
and because they are emotions with which we can all identify. . . . . It is to Tóibín’s immense credit that he makes the mundane seem so momentous.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“It may be that Tóibín’s most significant gift is a very basic and mysterious one: he creates fictional worlds in which readers find it easy to believe. . . . This ability to vivify imagined worlds is central to Brooklyn’s success. So long as we remain with Eilis Lacey in New York, her new world engrosses and enthrals us.” 
—London Review of Books

“Brooklyn is a controlled, understated novel . . . alive with authentic detail, moved along by the ripples of affection and doubt that shape any life: a novel that offers the reader serious pleasure. . . . A lovely, thoughtful book. I don’t know of any contemporary writer of English prose who can outdo Tóibín for clarity, simplicity and elegance.” 
—The Telegraph

“The ending of Brooklyn is a masterpiece of quiet reflection, bringing up deep emotions submerged under the placid exterior and giving the novel an ache that will linger for days.”
—Christian Science Monitor

“Tóibín conveys Eilis’s transformative struggles with an aching lyricism reminiscent of the mature Henry James, and ultimately confers upon his readers a sort of grace that illuminates the opportunities for tenderness in our lives. . . . Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal (starred review)COLM TÓIBÍN is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of many novels, including The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, and The Testament of Mary, all three of which were nominated for the Booker Prize. The Master also won the International Dublin Literary Award, Le Prix du meilleur livre etranger, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Novel Award, and finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award, was made into an Oscar-nominated film in 2015. Nora Webster was a New York Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. He is also the author of many short stories and works of non-fiction. He mainly lives in Dublin, Ireland.Eilis Lacey, sitting at the window of the upstairs living room in the house on Friary Street, noticed her sister walking briskly from work. She watched Rose crossing the street from sunlight into shade, carrying the new leather handbag that she had bought in Clerys in Dublin in the sale. Rose was wearing a cream-coloured cardigan over her shoulders. Her golf clubs were in the hall; in a few minutes, Eilis knew, someone would call for her and her sister would not return until the summer evening had faded.

Eilis’s bookkeeping classes were almost ended now; she had a manual on her lap about systems of accounting, and on the table behind her was a ledger where she had entered, as her homework, on the debit and credit sides, the daily business of a company whose details she had taken down in notes in the Vocational School the week before.

As soon as she heard the front door open, Eilis went downstairs. Rose, in the hall, was holding her pocket mirror in front of her face. She was studying herself closely as she applied lipstick and eye make-up before glancing at her overall appearance in the large hall mirror, settling her hair. Eilis looked on silently as her sister moistened her lips and then checked herself one more time in the pocket mirror before putting it away.

Their mother came from the kitchen to the hall.

“You look lovely, Rose,” she said. “You’ll be the belle of the golf club.”

“I’m starving,” Rose said, “but I’ve no time to eat.”

“I’ll make a special tea for you later,” her mother said. “Eilis and myself are going to have our tea now.”

Rose reached into her handbag and took out her purse. She placed a one-shilling piece on the hallstand. “That’s in case you want to go to the pictures,” she said to Eilis.

“And what about me?” her mother asked.

“She’ll tell you the story when she gets home,” Rose replied.

“That’s a nice thing to say!” her mother said.

All three laughed as they heard a car stop outside the door and beep its horn. Rose picked up her golf clubs and was gone.

Later, as her mother washed the dishes and Eilis dried them, another knock came to the door. When Eilis answered it, she found a girl whom she recognized from Kelly’s grocery shop beside the cathedral.

“Miss Kelly sent me with a message for you,” the girl said. “She wants to see you.”

“Does she?” Eilis asked. “And did she say what it was about?”

“No. You’re just to call up there tonight.”

“But why does she want to see me?”

“God, I don’t know, miss. I didn’t ask her. Do you want me to go back and ask her?”

“No, it’s all right. But are you sure the message is for me?”

“I am, miss. She says you are to call in on her.”

Since she had decided in any case to go to the pictures some other evening, and being tired of her ledger, Eilis changed her dress and put on a cardigan and left the house. She walked along Friary Street and Rafter Street into the Market Square and then up the hill to the cathedral. Miss Kelly’s shop was closed, so Eilis knocked on the side door, which led to the upstairs part where she knew Miss Kelly lived. The door was answered by the young girl who had come to the house earlier, who told her to wait in the hall.

Eilis could hear voices and movement on the floor above and then the young girl came down and said that Miss Kelly would be with her before long.

She knew Miss Kelly by sight, but her mother did not deal in her shop as it was too expensive. Also, she believed that her mother did not like Miss Kelly, although she could think of no reason for this. It was said that Miss Kelly sold the best ham in the town and the best creamery butter and the freshest of everything including cream, but Eilis did not think she had ever been in the shop, merely glanced into the interior as she passed and noticed Miss Kelly at the counter.

Miss Kelly slowly came down the stairs into the hallway and turned on a light.

“Now,” she said, and repeated it as though it were a greeting. She did not smile.

Eilis was about to explain that she had been sent for, and to ask politely if this was the right time to come, but Miss Kelly’s way of looking her up and down made her decide to say nothing. Because of Miss Kelly’s manner, Eilis wondered if she had been offended by someone in the town and had mistaken her for that person.

“Here you are, then,” Miss Kelly said.

Eilis noticed a number of black umbrellas resting against the hallstand.

“I hear you have no job at all but a great head for figures.”

“Is that right?”

“Oh, the whole town, anyone who is anyone, comes into the shop and I hear everything.”

Eilis wondered if this was a reference to her own mother’s consistent dealing in another grocery shop, but she was not sure. Miss Kelly’s thick glasses made the expression on her face difficult to read.

“And we are worked off our feet every Sunday here. Sure, there’s nothing else open. And we get all sorts, good, bad and indifferent. And, as a rule, I open after seven mass, and between the end of nine o’clock mass until eleven mass is well over, there isn’t room to move in this shop. I have Mary here to help, but she’s slow enough at the best of times, so I was on the lookout for someone sharp, someone who would know people and give the right change. But only on Sundays, mind. The rest of the week we can manage ourselves. And you were recommended. I made inquiries about you and it would be seven and six a week, it might help your mother a bit.”

Miss Kelly spoke, Eilis thought, as though she were describing a slight done to her, closing her mouth tightly between each phrase.

“So that’s all I have to say now. You can start on Sunday, but come in tomorrow and learn off all the prices and we’ll show you how to use the scales and the slicer. You’ll have to tie your hair back and get a good shop coat in Dan Bolger’s or Burke O’Leary’s.”

Eilis was already saving this conversation for her mother and Rose; she wished she could think of something smart to say to Miss Kelly without being openly rude. Instead, she remained silent.

“Well?” Miss Kelly asked.

Eilis realized that she could not turn down the offer. It would be better than nothing and, at the moment, she had nothing.

“Oh, yes, Miss Kelly,” she said. “I’ll start whenever you like.”

“And on Sunday you can go to seven o’clock mass. That’s what we do, and we open when it’s over.”

“That’s lovely,” Eilis said.

“So, come in tomorrow, then. And if I’m busy I’ll send you home, or you can fill bags of sugar while you wait, but if I’m not busy, I’ll show you all the ropes.”

“Thank you, Miss Kelly,” Eilis said.

“Your mother’ll be pleased that you have something. And your sister,” Miss Kelly said. “I hear she’s great at the golf. So go home now like a good girl. You can let yourself out.”

Miss Kelly turned and began to walk slowly up the stairs. Eilis knew as she made her way home that her mother would indeed be happy that she had found some way of making money of her own, but that Rose would think working behind the counter of a grocery shop was not good enough for her. She wondered if Rose would say this to her directly.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7200 × 5.2300 × 8.0000 in
Imprint	McClelland & Stewart
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780771083563
ISBN-10	0771083564
Author	Colm Toibin
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC019000, FIC014000
Subjects	books fiction, ireland, love story, historical fiction, immigrant, literary fiction, historical romance, alternate history, relationship books, fiction books, saga, romance novels, historical romance books, historical novels, historical fiction books, realistic fiction books, books historical fiction, historical fiction novels, page to screen, Friendship, america, historical, relationship, relationships, family, romance, love, drama, fiction, Literature, romance books, coming of age, FIC019000, novels, brooklyn, FIC014000, short stories, isolation