Brooklyn

Brooklyn is a novel by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, published in 2009.

The book is closely attentive to the practical arrangements of its heroine's new life: the letters from her sister Rose and her mother, the crossing, the standing arrangements in the boarding house, the shop floor, the class she pays for out of her wages and the small social hierarchy of the Irish in Brooklyn. Eilis is quiet and observant, and Tóibín writes her interior life in short sentences that make homesickness look like a physical condition rather than a mood. Her romance with Tony, an Italian-American plumber whose family absorbs her faster than his courtship does, gives her a version of belonging, and the novel then takes it away by sending her home to Ireland after a death in the family, where she becomes someone slightly different from the person who left. It is a novel about the cost of choosing one life over another, and the choice is never made cleanly. The book won the Costa Novel Award in 2009, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.