'Long Island' Is One of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

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Long Island, Colm Tóibín’s follow-up to his best-selling 2009 novel Brooklyn, picks up nearly 25 years after Eilis Lacey emigrated from Ireland and secretly married an Italian American plumber. The book begins in 1976, and Eilis, now in her 40s, lives in the titular suburbs outside of New York City with her husband Tony, their two teenagers, and a host of intrusive in-laws. Bored with the stay-at-home mom routine, Eilis longs for some excitement. Unfortunately, she finds it in the form of an irate Irishman who claims his wife is having Tony’s baby. The news of her husband’s infidelity—and his family’s blasé reaction to it—encourages Eilis to return to Ireland for the first time in nearly two decades. With apprehension and wonder, Tóibín writes of Eilis’s journey to find herself in the one place she thought she had outgrown.

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