A reader’s guide for “Long Island,” Oprah’s book club pick

Oprah Winfrey selected author Colm Tóibín’s “Long Island” as her newest book club pick.

“Long Island,” published by Simon & Schuster, is the sequel to Tóibín’s 2009 New York Times bestselling novel “Brooklyn.” It’s about a young girl named Eilis Lacey, who leaves her small Irish town for a new life in America.

“Long Island” picks up again more than 20 years later. She is married to a plumber named Tony and is the mother of two teenagers.

The following questions, discussion topics, and other materials are intended to enhance group conversation about “Long Island.”

This reading group guide to Long Island includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope these ideas enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

Twenty years after the events in Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín returns to the character of Eilis Lacey, who has built a life in New York with her husband, Tony, their two teenage children and their extended Italian-American family. Then Eilis discovers that Tony has a child with a married woman, whose husband plans to leave the baby on Eilis’s doorstep. Feeling isolated in her adopted country, betrayed by the person who made her feel at home, and certain that she does not want to raise another woman’s child, Eilis returns to County Wexford, Ireland, for the first time in two years. decades. There she reconnects with her mother, brother, widowed friend Nancy, and Jim Farrell – the man everyone thought she would marry. Now, on Long Island, Tóibín’s best-known character is offered a second chance at the life she left behind in this story complicated by weighty secrets, thunderous silences, and the deepest desires of the human heart.

Discussion Topics and Questions

1. Eilis quickly decides she wants nothing to do with Tony’s illegitimate son. How does she come to this decision and why does she feel so strongly about it? What would she lose if she gave in to pressure from Tony’s family to accept a future with the baby in their lives?
2. Discuss Eilis’s strained relationship with Tony’s large, close-knit Italian-American family. How did they make you feel welcome or more isolated?
3. Compare Eilis’ relationship with her mother to Tony’s relationship with his. Which aspects do you attribute to cultural differences and which to the unique circumstances of your lives?
4. How does Eilis use silence to communicate throughout the novel? Consider, for example, her and Tony’s car ride to the airport on pages 133–134. How does Tóibín’s writing give language to the weight of these wordless moments?
5. After Eilis left Jim behind in Ireland, he began seeing another woman, Mai Whitney. Compare what happened between them with his experience with Eilis.
6. Reflecting on the events of twenty years ago, Jim considers that he never asked Eilis about her life in New York. Likewise, when she returned, Tony never asked what happened that summer. Now, back in Ireland, Eilis fantasizes about Jim “quietly asking her what it had been like to be away all the years. No one else asked her that, not her mother, not Nancy, not anyone” (p. 169). Why do you think this happens? Tóibín writes of Eilis: “Nobody really knew anything about her” (p. 171). That is true?
7. What do you think of the way Mrs. Lacey’s behavior changes when Rosella and Larry arrive in Enniscorthy? How does Eilis understand this and her children’s response?
8. Domestic spaces play an important role in the novel, as characters redecorate a living room, install new appliances and furniture, and consider buying, selling, and building homes. What do these actions reveal about the aspirations and values ​​of characters like Eilis, Mrs. Lacey, Nancy, and Miriam?
9. What did you think of Eilis’ decision to meet Jim in Dublin? Is she justified in her choice because of Tony’s betrayal? Do you think she will ever tell him about this?
10. Discuss the role of secrets in the narrative. How would the story have changed if certain affairs and future plans had been shared – or revealed – earlier? Alternatively, what might have happened if certain secrets had never come to light?
11. “[Jim] “He understood something about people, he thought, because he owned a pub… He watched them do what didn’t make sense, unwilling to listen to arguments or reasons” (p. 219). How does this quote resonate with the choices people make? Do Tóibín’s characters do (or refuse to) understand people as well as he thinks he does?
12. Compare Eilis’s decision to hide her marriage to Tony when she returned to Ireland twenty years ago with Jim’s choice to hide his relationship with Nancy in 1976. Is one character more likable than the other? In the end, how does each of them deal with the consequences of the truth being revealed? Who had the most to lose?
13. What did you think of Nancy’s plan in the final chapters? Why doesn’t she confront Jim directly? What would you have done?
14. Discuss Jim’s final question to Eilis on page 292 and his decision not to answer it. What do you think will happen to these characters next? Imagine them another twenty years in the future. Would you read a third Tóibín novel about them at this stage in their lives?

Enhance your book club

1. Explore ‘Past Lives’ (2023): Watch the film ‘Past Lives,’ which explores the reunion of childhood sweethearts from Seoul as adults in New York – one happily married and the other newly single and visiting from South Korea. Discuss how the film’s take on the “one that got away” plot compares to Colm Tóibín’s in “Long Island.”
2. Read more works by Colm Tóibín, such as “Nora Webster”, which is also set in County Wexford and follows the titular character, who appears briefly in “Long Island”.
3. Growing up, Eilis’s children didn’t show much interest in learning about their former life in Ireland. Share with your book club what you know about your parents’ childhood. When did you first become interested in hearing about them? Consider using this as an opportunity to learn more by talking to family members and/or through genealogical research.