* OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK * INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *
* NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2024 BY TIME MAGAZINE, THE NEW YORKER, WASHINGTON POST, VULTURE, GLAMOUR, FRESH AIR, NPR, THE GUARDIAN, THE ECONOMIST, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, THE TIMES (London), THE IRISH TIMES, THE NEW STATESMAN, THE INDEPENDENT, THE OBSERVER, and more *

“Stunning.” —People * “Dazzling yet devastating...Tóibín is simply one of the world’s best living literary writers.” —The Boston Globe * “Momentous and hugely affecting.” —The Wall Street Journal *

From the beloved, critically acclaimed, bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving novel featuring Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work in twenty years.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at work an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting and suspenseful.

Long Island is a gorgeous story “about a woman thrashing against the constraints of fate” (Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air). It is “a wonder, rich with yearning and regret” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis).

Reading Group Guide

Reading Group Guide

Long Island

Colm Tóibín

This reading group guide for Long Island includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

Twenty years after the events of Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín returns to the character of Eilis Lacey, who has built a life in New York with her husband, Tony, their two teenage children and his extended Italian American family. Then Eilis learns that Tony has fathered a child with a married woman, whose husband plans to drop the baby on Eilis’s doorstep. Feeling isolated in her adopted country, betrayed by the person who made it feel like home and certain that she does not want to raise another woman’s child, Eilis returns to County Wexford, Ireland, for the first time in two decades. There she reconnects with her mother, brother, widowed friend Nancy and Jim Farrell—the man everyone once thought she would marry. Now, in Long Island, Tóibín’s best known character is offered a second chance at the life she left behind in this story complicated by weighty secrets, thundering silences and the deepest desires of the human heart.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Eilis quickly decides she wants nothing to do with Tony’s illegitimate baby. How does she arrive at this decision, and why does she feel so strongly about it? What would she lose by caving to the pressure from Tony’s family to accept a future with the baby in their lives?

2. Discuss Eilis’s fraught relationship with Tony’s large, tight-knit Italian American family. In what ways have they made her feel welcomed—or more isolated?

3. Compare Eilis’s relationship with her mother to Tony’s relationship with his. Which aspects do you attribute to cultural differences and which to the unique circumstances of their lives?

4. How does Eilis use silence to communicate throughout the novel? Consider, for example, her car ride with Tony to the airport on pages 133–34. How does Tóibín’s writing give language to the weight of these wordless moments?

5. After Eilis left Jim behind in Ireland, he began seeing another woman, Mai Whitney. Compare what ultimately happened between them to his experience with Eilis.

6. Reflecting on the events of twenty years ago, Jim considers that he never asked Eilis about her life in New York. Similarly, we learn that when she returned, Tony never inquired what happened that summer. Now back in Ireland, Eilis fantasizes about Jim “asking her quietly what it had been like, being away all the years. No one else had asked her this, not her mother or Nancy or anyone” (p. 169). Why do you think this is? “No one really knew anything about her,” Tóibín writes of Eilis (p. 171). Is this true?

7. What did you think of the way Mrs. Lacey’s behavior changes when Rosella and Larry arrive in Enniscorthy? How does Eilis make sense of this and her children’s response to being in Ireland for the first time?

8. Domestic spaces play a major role in the novel, as characters redecorate a sitting room, install new appliances and furniture and consider buying, selling and building homes. What do these actions reveal about the aspirations and values of characters like Eilis, Mrs. Lacey, Nancy and Miriam?

9. What did you think of Eilis’s decision to meet Jim in Dublin? Is she justified in her choice because of Tony’s betrayal? Do you think she will ever tell him about it?

10. Discuss the role of secrets in the narrative. How would the story have changed if certain love affairs and future plans had been shared—or revealed—earlier? Alternatively, what might have happened if certain secrets never came to light?

11. “[Jim] understood something about people, he thought, because he owned a pub. . . . He watched them doing what made no sense, unwilling to listen to argument or reason” (p. 219). How does this quote resonate with the choices Tóibín’s characters make (or refuse to make)? Does Jim understand people as well as he thinks he does?

12. Compare Eilis’s decision to hide her marriage to Tony when she came home to Ireland twenty years ago with Jim’s choice to hide his relationship with Nancy in 1976. Is one character more sympathetic than the other? In the end, how do they each deal with the consequences of the truth being revealed? Who had more to lose?

13. What did you think of Nancy’s plan in the final chapters? Why doesn’t she confront Jim directly? What would you have done?

14. Discuss Jim’s final question to Eilis on page 292 and her decision not to answer it. What do you think will happen to these characters next? Imagine them twenty more years in the future. Would you read a third novel from Tóibín about them at that stage of life?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Watch the film Past Lives (2023), which explores what happens when childhood sweethearts from Seoul reconnect as adults in New York, where one is happily married and the other is newly single and visiting from South Korea. Discuss how the film’s take on the “one who got away” storyline compares to Tóibín’s in Long Island.

2. Read more work by Colm Tóibín, such as Nora Webster, which is also set in County Wexford and follows the titular character, who features briefly in Long Island.

3. Growing up, Eilis’s children don’t show much interest in learning about her old life back in Ireland. Share with your book club what you know about your parents’ early lives. When did you first take an interest in hearing about them? Consider taking this as an opportunity to learn more by speaking with family members and/or through genealogical research.

About The Author

Photograph by Reynaldo Rivera

Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. He was also awarded the Bodley Medal, the Würth Prize for European Literature, and the Prix Femina spécial for his body of work.

Product Details

Publisher: Scribner (May 7, 2024)
Length: 304 pages
ISBN13: 9781476785134

Raves and Reviews

Praise for Long Island

"I was captivated. A wonderful page-turner to start your summer reading.” —Oprah Winfrey

“A brilliant novel. Beautifully crafted… makes for a riveting, wonderful read.” —Elizabeth Strout, The Guardian

“Eilis is an interesting and vivid character because she manages to make her destiny her choice... In her own mind, and in the eyes of sympathetic readers, she is free.” —New York Times Book Review

“Deeply felt but resolutely unsentimental… Tóibín uses masterly restraint to dramatize how lives can be destabilized by desire.” —The New Yorker

“Stunning.” —People

"Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.” —Los Angeles Times

“Momentous and hugely affecting. These pendant novels, will be the fiction for which this wonderful writer is best remembered.” —Wall Street Journal

"Tóibín has created a novel not to be missed.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Rich and doubly suspenseful… Tóibín, a master of his art, exploits to exquisite effect at the end, leaving us to wonder, yet again, what’s next.” —Los Angeles Times

“Dazzling yet devastating… Tóibín is simply one of the world’s best living literary writers…” —The Boston Globe

"Entrancing... riveting from the first page." —The Economist

“About secrets and dreams and the conflict of desire over duty… Long Island is a wonder, rich with yearning and regret.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Tóibín’s storytelling is rich and full of tension as he explores the complexities of life, the decisions we make, and the consequences that result.” —Glamour

“The quiet, moving story is told from the perspectives of different characters, each with a heartbreaking inability to express what they truly desire.” —AARP

“Fifteen years ago, Colm Tóibín won readers’ hearts with his best-selling novel Brooklyn. Now, with the sequel, Long Island, he just might break them… Tóibín writes beautifully about the struggle between the comfort of the familiar and the hope for something better.” —Columbia Magazine

“Tóibín’s latest sees the return of one of his most beloved heroines from his novel Brooklyn and deftly explores the longings of a woman who finds herself alone in her tilted marriage.” —The Chicago Review of Books

“A close observer of human nature, Tóibín writes with great depth of longing… Often it is what is unsaid, contained in the pauses, that grips the reader’s attention. There is plenty of beauty to savor.” —BookPage

“Quietly devastating… Tóibín is brilliant at tallying the weight of what goes unsaid between people… Tóibín’s mastery is on full display here.” —Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

“Tóibín writes with unparalleled fluidity and grace. Each character is intricately drawn with psychological acuity, emerging as fully, almost achingly human. Eilis is complicated, fearless, and compelling, much like her brilliant creator.” —Booklist, STARRED review

“Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton…the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland. A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.” —Kirkus, STARRED review