Twenty years after Brooklyn followed Eilis Fiorello (nee Lacey) from Enniscorthy to New York and into a marriage with Tony Fiorello, Long Island picks up her story in the late 1970s. Eilis is settled on Long Island with Tony and their two children, living the kind of middle-class American life that seemed like a destination in the first novel. Then a man appears at her front door and tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and will be leaving the baby on the Fiorello doorstep. That single piece of information detonates the foundations of Eilis’s carefully constructed life and sends her back to Ireland, where another life, and another man, have been waiting.
Long Island arrived in May 2024 to critical acclaim and commercial success, debuting high on bestseller lists and generating the kind of conversation that literary sequels rarely inspire. The response was deeply positive, though divided between readers who found it a worthy successor to Brooklyn and those who missed the earlier novel’s hopefulness.
The Unsaid Weight of Eilis Lacey
Toibin’s prose is the instrument through which everything in this novel operates, and it’s playing at the highest level. His sentences are deceptively simple, short, declarative, almost plain. But the space between those sentences is where the novel lives. What Eilis thinks but doesn’t say, what she notices but doesn’t comment on, what she feels but refuses to acknowledge, all of this occupies the white space on the page, and Toibin trusts the reader to find it there. The emotional effect is cumulative and devastating. Individual paragraphs seem unremarkable. Chapters, taken as a whole, are wrenching.
The portrait of a marriage in quiet crisis is handled with extraordinary precision. Tony and Eilis’s relationship isn’t dramatized through arguments or confrontations. It’s revealed through the texture of daily life: the things they discuss at dinner, the way they occupy the same house without quite sharing it, the unspoken understanding that their marriage has become a structure rather than a relationship. Toibin never tells you their marriage is dead. He shows you two people moving through the same space with an efficiency that suggests all the living has been done elsewhere.
The return to Enniscorthy is the novel’s emotional centerpiece. Ireland has changed in the decades since Eilis left, and the people she knew have changed with it. Jim Farrell, who loved her in Brooklyn and married someone else after she chose Tony, is now a widower. The possibility that sits between them is charged with the weight of decades of what-if, and Toibin handles their reconnection with a restraint that makes every glance and half-sentence feel enormous.
The supporting cast in Ireland is drawn with the kind of social observation that Toibin excels at. Small-town dynamics, the way information travels through a community, the careful negotiations between what people know and what they’ll admit to knowing, all of it rings true. Eilis’s mother, her friend Nancy, the various townspeople who remember her departure, each one adds a brushstroke to a portrait of a place that remembers everything and forgives selectively.
The novel’s exploration of female agency in the 1970s is embedded rather than stated. Eilis’s options, in both America and Ireland, are shaped by the expectations of marriage, motherhood, and propriety. Toibin doesn’t editorialize about this. He simply presents the walls of Eilis’s world and lets you feel how they constrain her.
The Chill Beneath the Surface
The pacing will challenge readers who fell in love with Brooklyn’s forward momentum. Long Island moves slowly and deliberately, with long stretches where the primary action is Eilis thinking about what she might do, talking to people without saying what she means, and circling decisions she’s not ready to make. This is the novel’s method, and for readers attuned to Toibin’s frequency, it’s hypnotic. For others, it can feel static, particularly in the middle sections where the Long Island and Enniscorthy storylines alternate without building toward clear convergence.
The tonal shift from Brooklyn is significant. The first novel, despite its complications, was fundamentally a story about possibility, a young woman discovering herself through emigration and love. Long Island is about the consequences of those discoveries. It’s cooler, sadder, and more interested in what people sacrifice for the lives they choose. Readers who return to Eilis hoping for warmth may find themselves in a novel that’s more interested in honesty than comfort.
Eilis herself is a more challenging protagonist here than she was in Brooklyn. Her choices in that novel, particularly her secret marriage, created the trap she now inhabits, and Toibin doesn’t soften the connection. Eilis is sympathetic but not entirely innocent, and some readers have struggled with a protagonist whose passivity sometimes shades into complicity in her own unhappiness.
The ending has sparked considerable debate. Without spoiling it, the novel’s resolution is ambiguous in a way that some readers find devastating and others find frustrating. Toibin leaves crucial questions unanswered, trusting the reader to sit with uncertainty rather than providing the closure that a more conventional sequel would offer.
Tony is a figure defined more by absence than presence. He barely appears in the novel, and while that absence is partly the point, some readers wished for a fuller portrait of the man Eilis married. His infidelity is the inciting event, but his inner life remains almost entirely opaque.
The Life Not Taken
Long Island is fundamentally a novel about the gap between the life you chose and the life you wonder about. Every character in the book is haunted by a version of themselves that didn’t happen. Eilis wonders what would have happened if she’d stayed in Ireland. Jim wonders what would have happened if she’d chosen him. Even the supporting characters are defined by the distance between where they are and where they thought they’d be. Toibin isn’t interested in suggesting that the unlived life is necessarily better. He’s interested in the way its phantom presence shapes the life you’re actually living.
That theme connects Long Island to Brooklyn in ways that transcend plot. Both novels are about emigration, choice, and the impossibility of having everything. But where Brooklyn was about making a choice, Long Island is about living with one.
Should You Read Long Island?
If Brooklyn is among your favorite novels, Long Island is essential reading, though you should prepare for a different emotional register. Readers who appreciate the restrained, emotionally precise fiction of Elizabeth Strout, Anne Enright, or William Trevor will find Toibin operating at a comparable level. It’s a book for patient readers who find as much meaning in what characters don’t say as in what they do. Skip it if you need plot momentum, emotional warmth, or definitive resolution. Long Island asks you to live inside Eilis’s indecision, and that’s either the novel’s greatest strength or its biggest obstacle, depending on your temperament.
The Verdict on Long Island
Long Island is the rare sequel that earns its existence by refusing to replicate what made the original beloved. Toibin writes about marriage, memory, and the weight of choices made decades ago with a precision that’s almost unbearable. His Eilis is older, more complicated, and less hopeful than the woman who crossed the Atlantic in Brooklyn, and the novel honors that complexity by never offering easy answers. The slow pace and emotional coolness will frustrate some readers, and the ending will satisfy few. But as a piece of literary craftsmanship, it’s among Toibin’s finest work, a novel that trusts silence to carry the weight of everything its characters can’t bring themselves to say.