Long Island

Returning to Eilis Lacey two decades after Brooklyn, Tóibín reopens her story with a plot device that reads almost like soap opera — an Irishman appears at her door in 1976 to announce that his wife is pregnant by Eilis's husband Tony, and he won't raise the child — and then refuses to play it for melodrama. True to form, Tóibín slows the material down, rotating close attention among Eilis, her mother back in Enniscorthy, and her old suitor Jim Farrell, so the novel becomes less about the affair itself than about the long, quiet calculations people make about home, obligation, and who gets to be forgiven. Critics have split on whether the deliberate pacing pays off, but there's consensus that Tóibín's control of interiority remains distinctive.