Colm Toibin Book Club

Come and join us to celebrate the release of Colm Toibin’sLong Island, the highly anticipated sequel to Brooklyn. The first event will take place on the release date of Long Island on 24th Maywhen we will discuss Brooklyn, we will then meet again on 27th June to chat about our experiences of reading Long Island.

Thursday 24th May – Brooklyn book club

Thursday 27th June – Long Island book club

The event is free but we recommend booking as spots are limited. Please ensure that you book a ticket for each date if you want to participate in both book clubs.

Brooklyn

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a devastating story of love, loss and one woman's terrible choice between duty and personal freedom. The book that inspired the major motion picture starring Saoirse Ronan.

It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.

Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

Long Island

The sequel to the prize-winning, bestselling novel Brooklyn.

A novel of enormous wit and profound emotional resonance from one of the world's finest writers.

In Colm Toibin's masterful new novel, we are reunited with Eilis Lacey, the heroine of Brooklyn, twenty years on, in the 1970s, living with her husband, Tony Fiorello, and her children in a house in Long Island, rather too close to her Fiorello in-laws. A shocking piece of news propels Eilis back to Ireland, to a world she thought she had long left behind and to ways of living, and loving, she thought she had lost.