Editors Reads Verdict
One of the most perfectly written novels of recent decades — Tóibín's restraint is not coldness but precision, and the emotion accumulates in the spaces between sentences in ways that hit harder than direct statement.
What We Loved
- The prose is among the finest of any contemporary Irish novelist — every sentence is exactly as long as it needs to be
- The choice Eilis faces at the novel's end is genuinely unresolvable and handled with complete fairness to both options
- The 2015 film with Saoirse Ronan is excellent and complements the novel
Minor Drawbacks
- The emotional restraint can read as cold until the accumulation hits — readers who want explicit emotion may not connect early
- The Brooklyn boarding house world is vivid; the Ireland sections are necessarily paler
Key Takeaways
- → The act of leaving home is also an act of creating yourself — the self you become in the new place is different from the self you would have become
- → Returning home after building a life elsewhere is not a restoration — it is a rupture in what you have become
- → The choice between two lives is not resolvable by logic — it requires knowing which person you want to be
| Author | Colm Tóibín |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Pages | 262 |
| Published | May 5, 2009 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Literary fiction readers who want a perfectly crafted novel about immigration and identity, and anyone interested in mid-century Irish and Irish-American experience. |
The Leaving
Eilis Lacey does not particularly want to leave Enniscorthy. Her sister Rose has arranged it — there are no opportunities in Ireland, and a priest from Brooklyn has offered to find her a position in a department store. She goes because there is no reason not to, because Rose has gone to the trouble, because a life of good reasons for staying is not the same thing as a life.
Brooklyn in 1952 is another world: the boarding house run by Mrs Kehoe, the Bartocci department store with its basement full of Brooklyn Italians shopping for Christmas, the evening classes at Brooklyn College, and eventually Tony Fiorello — a plumber, a Dodgers fan, a man who falls in love with her with Italian straightforwardness and waits for her to fall in love with him back.
She does. She is happy. She goes home to Ireland for a family funeral and discovers that the life she might have had is still there, waiting. A man in Enniscorthy has noticed her. Her mother needs her. Ireland has not changed but she has.
The Choice
Tóibín constructs the novel so that both options — Brooklyn and Tony, or Enniscorthy and the life she might still claim — are equally valid and equally costly. He does not load the deck. What he does instead is show, with extraordinary precision, how a person becomes committed to a life: not through grand decisions but through the accumulation of small acts, small happinesses, small obligations.
The final pages are as devastating as any in recent literary fiction, and they are achieved entirely through restraint.
Our rating: 4.5/5 — Perfectly written, quietly devastating, and one of the finest accounts of immigration and identity in contemporary fiction.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Brooklyn" about?
Eilis Lacey, a young woman from Enniscorthy in County Wexford, emigrates to Brooklyn in the early 1950s. She builds a life, finds work, falls in love, and is called home by a family death — and faces a choice she cannot make without losing something she cannot replace.
Who should read "Brooklyn"?
Literary fiction readers who want a perfectly crafted novel about immigration and identity, and anyone interested in mid-century Irish and Irish-American experience.
What are the key takeaways from "Brooklyn"?
The act of leaving home is also an act of creating yourself — the self you become in the new place is different from the self you would have become Returning home after building a life elsewhere is not a restoration — it is a rupture in what you have become The choice between two lives is not resolvable by logic — it requires knowing which person you want to be
Is "Brooklyn" worth reading?
One of the most perfectly written novels of recent decades — Tóibín's restraint is not coldness but precision, and the emotion accumulates in the spaces between sentences in ways that hit harder than direct statement.
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