“Brooklyn”

In “Brooklyn,” Irish writer Colm Toibin portrays two extreme—and extremely different—worlds. One is the village of Enniscorthy, Ireland. The other is Brooklyn, New York. Eilis Lacey, Toibin’s lonely and emotionally distant heroine, works in a dry goods store while taking up a room in a women-only boardinghouse. The Guardian calls Eilis’s writing “unostentatious even in its plainness, avoiding musical balance but also taking care not to seem mannered or excessively clipped.” Toibin captures the misery of Eilis’s stay in Brooklyn, as she continues to long for the simple life back home even while adapting to the high-paced industrial universe of New York. Writing for the New York Times, Leisl Schillinger says, “Colm Toibin, born, like Eilis, in Enniscorthy, is an expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions”: “Toibin quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim.”