Long Island

Critics Review

• With this elating and humane novel, Colm Tóibín has produced a masterwork

  Sunday Times, on Brooklyn

• Long Island is the best new novel I’ve read in years – and it’s as persuasive an argument in defence of the unique capability of the novel form as you could ever hope to find

  Telegraph

• You don’t have to have read Brooklyn to enjoy the many pleasures of Long Island. It is a masterful novel full of longing and regret. A tale of lovers reconnecting, of compromise, and the settling that can come later in life. Intensely moving and yet full of restraint, I was sad to turn the final page

  Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain

• Heartbreak, wistfulness, cracking dialogue . . . This is Tóibín at his best

  The Times

• Engrossing, truthful and humane, it’s a magnificent achievement

  Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times

• His best yet . . . It reads like the tensest of stage plays, but with all the pleasures of interiority that the novel form allows. I haven’t wanted to hug this many characters in a while

  Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times and The Happy Couple

• A masterful and uproariously entertaining book, glittering with all of Toibin’s intelligence and humane wit, as compelling, passionate and quietly enigmatic as its unforgettable protagonist Eilis Lacey

  Colin Barrett, author of Wild Houses

• The most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman I have read in a long time

  Zoë Heller, Guardian, Books of the Year, on Brooklyn

• A work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt your life

  Ali Smith, TLS, Books of the Year, on Brooklyn

• Suffused with humane depth, funny, affecting, deftly plotted . . . a novel of magnificent accomplishment

  Peter Kemp, Sunday Times, Novel of the Year, on Brooklyn

• Colm Tóibín’s heartrending follow-up to his beloved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, is the rare instance in which a sequel is every bit as good as the original

  NPR

• Exquisitely drawn

  New York Times

• Brooklyn and Long Island . . . capture the decency and ordinariness of the characters as well as the deep emotional ruptures that drive them toward disorder. The confrontations between these people, so long delayed, feel momentous and hugely affecting. These pendant novels, I think, will be the fiction for which this wonderful writer is best remembered.

  Wall Street Journal

• Tóibín [is] a master of his art . . . exquisite

  Los Angeles Times