Brooklyn
COLM TÓIBÍN

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín 222 reviews (2009) (272p) Amazon.com Best Books ALA Notable Books - Fiction Finalist

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Book Description

Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm Tóibín's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself. Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn to sponsor Eilis in America -- to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland" -- she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind. Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future. By far Tóibín's most instantly engaging and emotionally resonant novel, Brooklyn will make readers fall in love with his gorgeous writing and spellbinding characters.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2009: Committed to a quiet life in little Enniscorthy, Ireland, the industrious young Eilis Lacey reluctantly finds herself swept up in an unplanned adventure to America, engineered by the family priest and her glamorous, "ready for life" sister, Rose. Eilis's determination to embrace the spirit of the journey despite her trepidation--especially on behalf of Rose, who has sacrificed her own chance of leaving--makes a bittersweet center for Brooklyn. Colm Tóibín's spare portrayal of this contemplative girl is achingly lovely, and every sentence rings with truth. Readers will find themselves swept across the Atlantic with Eilis to a boarding house in Brooklyn where she painstakingly adapts to a new life, reinventing herself and her surroundings in the letters she writes home. Just as she begins to settle in with the help of a new love, tragedy calls her home to Enniscorthy, and her separate lives suddenly and painfully merge into one. Tóibín's haunted heroine glows on the page, unforgettably and lovingly rendered, and her story reflects the lives of so many others exiled from home. --Daphne Durham

Other Award Winning Books by Colm Tóibín

Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín 578 reviews (2014) (384p) (Amazon Top100) (NYT100) Read Reviews | Visit this book's Amazon.com page

The Empty Family: Stories by Colm Tóibín 48 reviews (2011) (288p) (Amazon Top100) (LJ Top10) Read Reviews | Visit this book's Amazon.com page

The Master by Colm Tóibín 203 reviews (2004) (352p) (Booker) (NYTimes) (LATimes) (TIME) Read Reviews | Visit this book's Amazon.com page

The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín 39 reviews (1999) (288p) (Booker) Read Reviews | Visit this book's Amazon.com page

Colm Tóibín Award Stats

Major Prize* Nominations 3   Unique Books Nominated for a Major Prize* 3   Pulitzer Prize Wins 0   Pulitzer Prize Nominations 0   National Book Critics Circle Award Wins 0   National Book Critics Circle Award Nominations 0   National Book Award Wins 0   National Book Award Nominations 0   Man Booker Prize Wins 0   Man Booker Prize Nominations 2 The Blackwater Lightship · The Master ·   PEN/Faulkner Award Wins 0   PEN/Faulkner Award Nominations 0

*Major Prize = Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, and PEN/Faulkner Award

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