In a small town in the south-east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life - days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall – until she realizes that she has found a sort of happiness. But when tragic news summons her back to Ireland, and the constrictions of her old life unexpectedly give way to new possibilities, she finds herself facing a terrible choice: between love and happiness in the land where she belongs and the promises she must keep on the far side of the ocean.
Reviews
The Literary Review
Sam Leith
"...it gathers its power through the precision of its telling. What with Tóibín having recently come within a whisker of winning the Man Booker Prize for a novel about Henry James, it’s hard not to see James as the obvious point of comparison. He’s the right one. "
01/05/2009
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The Spectator
Sebastian Smee
"...a simple and utterly exquisite novel. The writing is so transparent, so apparently guileless, that I kept wondering what trickery Tóibín had used to keep me so involved, so attached, so unaccountably warmed."
06/05/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Thomas Jones
"...quietly magnificent... Tóibín describes these events, ordinary enough in their own right but of extraordinary importance to the woman experiencing them, in unhurried, unostentatious prose, delineating with gentle precision the complex thoughts and feelings of his protagonist."
05/05/2009
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The Times
Leo Robson
"The book's pacing is gentle, and the language not ornate. But these are facts, not criticisms. Toíbín's aim is to portray uncertainty and dislocation as they are experienced from the inside, and that is what he has done in this uncoercive, single-minded novel, which is graced with what [Henry] James called “the economy of art”."
24/04/2009
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The Sunday Times
Peter Kemp
"What makes his new novel, Brooklyn, so elating — as well as so brilliant — an achievement is that, while losing none of the unillusioned lucidity of his earlier work, it adds a fresh dimension of humane warmth... The result is a novel that stands out as remarkable even among Ireland’s distinguished roll of fiction about home and exile."
19/04/2009
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The Financial Times
Angel Gurría-Quintana
"His most memorable characters – the grandmother in The Blackwater Lightship, for instance – are women. Eilis is no exception. This knack for inventing convincingly complex women is one thing Tóibín shares with Henry James. They also share the ability to produce seemingly plain prose loaded with meaningful detail. Tóibín writes sentences in which nothing appears to happen, and yet much is communicated."
01/06/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
James Walton
"Brooklyn goes about its business with such quiet readability that it takes a while to realise how powerfully subversive all of this is. The current preferred myth is that we are, or at least should be, or should want to be, in control of our own lives. By capturing the unspectacular arbitrariness of Eilis's experiences so convincingly, Tóibín subjects this myth to a thorough and calmly intelligent kicking."
10/05/2009
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The Independent
Aamer Hussein
"Eilis' sensibility is at once the novel's fulcrum and its flaw... Brooklyn is an accomplished and at times enigmatic novel. Unengaged in some sections with its own emotional topography, sensuous or psychologically intriguing in others, it's in all probability a transitional work in its author's varied and fascinated oeuvre, hovering in execution if not length between the techniques of long and short fiction."
01/05/2009
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The New Statesman
Benjamin Markovits
"People are not very remarkable, and one of the reasons we can’t know them fully is because they aren’t very vivid. This makes for a novel that is sometimes dull and almost always painful... In spite of its limitations, or rather because of them, Brooklyn is a tremendously moving and powerful work. Tóibín has as profound a sense of the shape and pace of a novel as any living writer I can think of."
23/04/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Robert Hanks
"He is determined to make the point that freedom and opportunity depend on perspective... The lesson is worthwhile, but in laying it out Tóibín seems to retreat from the imagination he shows elsewhere, so that I put Brooklyn down with a sense of dissatisfaction. But it is a lovely, thoughtful book. I don’t know of any contemporary writer of English prose who can outdo Tóibín for clarity, simplicity and elegance."
08/05/2009
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