Brooklyn

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 el