The Seventies! The decade of flares, chevron moustaches and disco. Well forget all that. In Long Island, Colm Tóibín’s sequel to Fifties-set Brooklyn, it’s frosted glass doors, Vietnam protests on the tele and people suddenly trying to give up ciggies after years of carefree chain-smoking that indicate we have skipped forward two decades.
Brooklyn (2009) followed small-town Irish girl Eilis Lacey across the sea to New York, complete with a transatlantic love triangle. Readers loved it, it made Tóibín a mega prize-winning author and the film adaptation helped launch Saoirse Ronan’s career.
