The great thing about writing a sequel is that you can go straight in with the action, and no need to worry about setting the scene. Colm Tóibín certainly does that in Long Island, the follow-up to his 2009 novel Brooklyn. That book shifted Tóibín from being a respected, prize-friendly literary novelist to a commercial success: his publishers’ publicity materials at the time accurately predicted that it would be his “breakout novel” , which would “do for him what Atonement did for [Ian] McEwan”.
Brooklyn succeeded artistically and commercially because it told a simple story well: a satisfyingly sad tale of thwarted love in 1950s Ireland. It featured Eilis Lacey, a young woman living in Tóibín’s old stamping ground of Enniscorthy, a town in County Wexford near the country’s south-east coast. In Brooklyn, Eilis went to the US and secretly married, came back to Ireland for a family death and then hampered her mother’s hopes by returning to America rather than settling down with local boy Jim Farrell. Her decision seemed to surprise Eilis as much as it did the reader: her dominant characteristic in Brooklyn was a maddening passivity toward her own destiny – at least, right until the moment she decided to return to America.
