A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
Longlisted for the Booker Prize
Winner of the Costa Book Award
A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century
“Every once in a while a book appears to remind us why we love fiction. . . . [Brooklyn is] an enormously absorbing, nuanced read that steeps us in its character’s world—and gradually surprises us with its moral resonance. . . . [Brooklyn] soars in its deeply effective final section."
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Quietly majestic. . . . Tóibín can conjure for us [Eilis Lacey’s] trajectories both glimpsed and lived, in their satisfactions and their sadness . . . . A meaningful accomplishment indeed.”
—New York Review of Books
"Tóibín is himself a master . . . of a kind of deep gentleness, even as the darkness falls on his characters. . . . Here is a writer who quietly watches and reports, shocked at nothing, missing nothing."
—Globe and Mail
“[A] masterly tale. . . . There is not a sentence or a thought out of place.”
—Irish Times
"Brooklyn is Colm Tóibín's most beautifully executed novel to date. . . . Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect. . . . There is in fact too much sorrow in the world, and Tóibín, better than any of his contemporaries, knows how to capture its timbre in fiction."
—Times Literary Supplement
“One of those magically quiet novels that sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations. . . . [A] triumph. . . . In Brooklyn [Tóibín] creates the purest form of fiction, a small world that employs few references to the real world. It transcends time and place. It leaves readers wondering if Eilis is making the right life for herself, the same question we all face."
—USA TODAY
“Tóibín creates a narrative of remarkable power, writing with aspareness and intensity that give the minutest shadesof feeling immense emotional impact.”
—The New Yorker
“Tóibín is an immensely gifted and accomplished writer who has covered a remarkable range of subjects . . . so it comes as no surprise that Brooklyn is intelligent and affecting. . . . Tóibín’s prose is graceful but never showy, and his characters are uniformly interesting and believable. As a study of the quest for home and the difficulty of figuring out where it really is, Brooklyn has a universality that goes far beyond the specific details of Eilis’s struggle.”
—Washington Post
“A classical coming-of-age story, pure, unsensationalized, quietly profound.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Tóibín’s tributes to old New York, both in landscape and disposition, beautifully reflect on a time past, but it’s Eilis’s universal struggles with matters of the heart that make this novel such a moving, deeply satisfying read.”
—Entertainment Weekly
"With this elating and humane novel, Colm Tóibín has produced a masterwork."
—Sunday Times
“Tóibín’s prose is as elegant in its simplicity as it is complex in the emotions it evokes.”
—New York Times Magazine
"A soothing, specific prescription for unquiet thoughts. . . . Colm Toibin, born, like Eilis, in Enniscorthy, is an expert, patient fisherman of submerged emotions. . . . Toibin exercises sustained subtlety and touching respect. . . . [He] quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim."
—New York Times Book Review
"Tóibín fashions a compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds, unsure almost until the novel’s final page where her obligations and affections truly reside. . . . A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Meticulously crafted prose. . . . An accomplished and at times enigmatic novel. . . . It elicits, in its finest moments, a lingering sense of hope in the possible futures of youthful desire and love in the middle of life's bleakness."
—The Independent
"Engaging. . . . A stirring and satisfying moral tale."
—Publishers Weekly
"Disarmingly effective and affecting."
—National Post
“[Tóibín is] a writer whose stylish, elegantly crafted stories of calm surfaces and agitated depths carry genuine urgency. . . . [He is one of] his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power.”
—Los Angeles Times
"A small masterpiece. Deceptively spare, composed with a profound simplicity, Brooklyn explores the experience of exile in a way that resonates far beyond the limits of a tale about an Irish girl’s passage to postwar America and her shy apprehension of first love in a foreign land.”
—The Guardian
“In the way that the best stories of Alice Munro carry the heft of fully realized novels, Brooklyn is as tightly constructed as the finest of short stories. . . . In spare yet delicate prose, Tóibín delineates characters desperately hiding their deepest emotions from each other and from themselves.”
—Montreal Gazette
“A quietly affecting story. . . . We begin to care deeply about Eilis because her feelings of loneliness, insecurity, homesickness and romantic doubt are so meticulously conveyed
and because they are emotions with which we can all identify. . . . . It is to Tóibín’s immense credit that he makes the mundane seem so momentous.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
"It may be that Tóibín’s most significant gift is a very basic and mysterious one: he creates fictional worlds in which readers find it easy to believe. . . . This ability to vivify imagined worlds is central to Brooklyn’s success. So long as we remain with Eilis Lacey in New York, her new world engrosses and enthrals us."
—London Review of Books
"Brooklyn is a controlled, understated novel . . . alive with authentic detail, moved along by the ripples of affection and doubt that shape any life: a novel that offers the reader serious pleasure. . . . A lovely, thoughtful book. I don’t know of any contemporary writer of English prose who can outdo Tóibín for clarity, simplicity and elegance."
—The Telegraph
"The ending of Brooklyn is a masterpiece of quiet reflection, bringing up deep emotions submerged under the placid exterior and giving the novel an ache that will linger for days."
—Christian Science Monitor
“Tóibín conveys Eilis’s transformative struggles with an aching lyricism reminiscent of the mature Henry James, and ultimately confers upon his readers a sort of grace that illuminates the opportunities for tenderness in our lives. . . . Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
