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Awards

Costa Novel Award (formerly the Whitbread Award) : Winner 2009

Synopsis

It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time.

Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

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Reviews

Critic Review:

‘Socially fascinating, suffused with humane depth, funny, affecting, deftly plotted and written with a subtlety that packs powerful effects into simple-seeming prose, this is a novel of magnificent accomplishment.’
Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times

‘A profoundly gifted world writer.’
Sebastian Barry, Guardian

‘This novel contains, among other things, the most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman I have read in a long time.’
Zoë Heller, Guardian

‘It stood out for its ability to use surface simplicity to mask (for a time) vast depths of emotional and psychological complexity’.
John Lanchester Guardian

‘A piercing story about how quietly and unexpectedly and irrevocably things can go wrong. Pin-perfect psychological realism.’
Sam Leith, Daily Mail

‘This beautiful book reads like a story that didn’t make it into Dubliners, but easily could have’.
Paul Muldoon, TLS

‘Tóibín’s perfection is simply the unobtrusive vehicle of this surprisingly complex adventure.’
Graham Robb, TLS

‘ It isn’t just a book for Christmas; a work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt your life.’
Ali Smith, TLS

‘My book of the year is Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn, a profound, deceptively slight novel of immense humanity, wit and subtlety. By far the best novel of 2009.’
Robert McCrum, The Lady

‘Elegant and controlled, Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn, the tale of Eilis, a young woman who emigrates from Ireland to America in the 1950s, is the book that broke my heart this year.’
David Vann, Observer

‘No book this year gave me greater pleasure, and I was only sorry to have to let her (Eilis) go.’
Nell Freudenberger, FT

‘This wonderful novel illustrates how Colm Tóibín is just getting better and better.’
Independent

‘A beautifully crafted work that transformed ordinary lives into something extraordinary.’
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Saturday Telegraph

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