Colm Tóibín to publish sequel to Brooklyn next year

Long Island reunites readers with Eilis Lacey and her family 20 years after Brooklyn

Saoirse Ronan in the film version of Colm Tóibín's novel Brooklyn.

Colm Tóibín has written a sequel to Brooklyn, which won the 2009 Costa Novel Award and whose 2015 film adaptation by Nick Hornby starred Saoirse Ronan and was directed by John Crowley.

Long Island reunites readers with Eilis Lacey, 20 years after Brooklyn. It is the 1970s and Lacey is living with her husband Tony Fiorello and their children in Long Island. But “a shocking piece of news at the opening of the novel propels Eilis back to Ireland, to a world she thought she had long left behind and to ways of living, and loving, she thought she had lost.”

Long Island will be published here in May next year by Picador and by Scribner in the US.

President Michael D Higgins presents Colm Tóibín with his Laureate medal ahead of his inaugural lecture as the Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022-2024. Photograph: Maxwells

Picador publisher Mary Mount said: “Colm Tóibín is one of the world’s finest writers and Brooklyn is a novel that was loved by readers around the world. It is overwhelming to be reunited with the characters of that novel once again and to see them anew. This is a novel of profound emotional resonance and enormous wit, both qualities having long been hallmarks of Tóibín’s writing.”

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Tóibín was recently named Ireland’s third Laureate for Irish Fiction, succeeding Sebastian Barry and Anne Enright. He has won the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Costa Prize, David Cohen Award, the IMPAC award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times.

Martin Doyle

Martin Doyle

Martin Doyle is Books Editor of The Irish Times