2009 Costa Novel Award Winner

Liam McIlvanney writes:
It may be that Tóibín’s most significant gift is a very basic and mysterious one: he creates fictional worlds in which readers find it easy to believe. The Spanish mountain village in The South, the Wexford coastal town in The Heather Blazing, the anglophone Buenos Aires in The Story of the Night: these worlds are realised and sustained in the most authoritative fashion. Yes, this is a question of the telling detail, the deft ‘evocation of place’. But it’s also a question of tone, of how Tóibín’s alert, unflustered prose seems all the time equal to its occasions, how he never ‘writes up’ but only writes his scenes, in spare, euphonious sentences whose assurance carries forward to the reader. This ability to vivify imagined worlds is central to Brooklyn’s success. So long as we remain with Eilis Lacey in New York, her new world – the throbbing shop floor at Bartocci’s, the clammy dances in the parish hall – engrosses and enthrals us. But when she returns to Ireland in the novel’s final section, the world of Enniscorthy and Cush wells up with such pungency and focus that Brooklyn seems suddenly distant and pale.

(LRB 25 June 2009)

Colm Tóibín’s latest novel explores the dilemmas, opportunities and sorrows of emigration and return. The book begins in Enniscorthy, the Wexford town where the novel’s heroine Eilis Lacey (and Tóibín himself) grew up, lovingly evoked in prose of great warmth and humour. But in the 1950s there is little chance of finding work there, and Eilis leaves for New York, where a new life and new love almost succeed in breaking her ties with home. ‘Brooklyn is Colm Tóibín’s most beautifully executed novel to date,’ wrote Ruth Scurr in the TLS. ‘It is an intimate portrait of a sad life, built up steadily from simple descriptive sentences, laid down with precision at a controlled pace. Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect.’

Viking | hardback 252 pp. |ISBN: 9780670918126