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A reader’s guide for “Long Island,” Oprah’s book club pick
Oprah Winfrey has selected “Long Island” by author Colm Tóibín as her newest book club pick.
“Long Island,” published by Simon & Schuster, is the sequel to Tóibín’s 2009 New York Times best-selling novel, “Brooklyn.” It is about a young woman named Eilis Lacey, who left her small Irish town for a new life in America.
“Long Island” picks up more than 20 years later. She’s married to a plumber named Tony and is the mother of two teenagers.
The questions, discussion topics and other material that follow are intended to enhance a group’s conversation of “Long Island.”
This reading group guide for 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 that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Twenty years after the events of 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 his extended Italian American family. Then Eilis learns that Tony has fathered a child with a married woman, whose husband plans to drop the baby on Eilis’s doorstep. Feeling isolated in her adopted country, betrayed by the person who made it feel like 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 decades. There she reconnects with her mother, brother, widowed friend Nancy and Jim Farrell-the man everyone once thought she would marry. Now, in 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, thundering silences and the deepest desires of the human heart.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
- Eilis quickly decides she wants nothing to do with Tony’s illegitimate baby. How does she arrive at this decision, and why does she feel so strongly about it? What would she lose by caving to the pressure from Tony’s family to accept a future with the baby in their lives?
- Discuss Eilis’s fraught relationship with Tony’s large, tight-knit Italian American family. In what ways have they made her feel welcomed or more isolated?
- Compare Eilis’s relationship with her mother to Tony’s relationship with his. What aspects do you attribute to cultural differences, and which to the unique circumstances of their lives?
- How does Eilis use silence to communicate throughout the novel? Consider, for example, her car ride with Tony to the airport on pages 133–134. How does Tóibín’s writing give language to the weight of these wordless moments?
- After Eilis left Jim behind in Ireland, he began seeing another woman, Mai Whitney. Compare what ultimately happened between them to his experience with Eilis.
- Reflecting on the events of twenty years ago, Jim considers that he never asked Eilis about her life in New York. Similarly, when she returned, Tony never inquired what happened that summer. Now back in Ireland, Eilis fantasizes about Jim “asking her quietly what it had been like, being away all the years. No one else had asked her this, not her mother or Nancy or anyone” (p. 169). Why do you think this is? Tóibín writes of Eilis, “No one really knew anything about her” (p. 171). Is this true?
- What did you think of the way Mrs. Lacey’s behavior changes when Rosella and Larry arrive in Enniscorthy? How does Eilis make sense of this and her children’s response?
- Domestic spaces play a major role in the novel as characters redecorate a sitting 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?
- What did you think of Eilis’s 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 it?
- Discuss the role of secrets in the narrative. How would the story have changed if certain love affairs and future plans had been shared—or revealed—earlier? Alternatively, what might have happened if certain secrets never came to light?
- “[Jim] understood something about people, he thought, because he owned a pub… He watched them doing what made no sense, unwilling to listen to argument or reason” (p. 219). How does this quote resonate with the choices Tóibín’s characters make (or refuse to make)? Does Jim understand people as well as he thinks he does?
- Compare Eilis’s decision to hide her marriage to Tony when she came home to Ireland twenty years ago with Jim’s choice to hide his relationship with Nancy in 1976. Is one character more sympathetic than the other? In the end, how do they each deal with the consequences of the truth being revealed? Who had more to lose?
- What did you think of Nancy’s plan in the final chapters? Why doesn’t she confront Jim directly? What would you have done?
- Discuss Jim’s final question to Eilis on page 292 and her decision not to answer it. What do you think will happen to these characters next? Imagine them twenty more years in the future. Would you read a third novel from Tóibín about them at that stage of life?
Enhance Your Book Club
- 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 who got away” storyline compares to Colm Tóibín’s in “Long Island.”
- Read more works by Colm Tóibín, such as “Nora Webster,” which is also set in County Wexford and follows the titular character, who features briefly in “Long Island.”
- Growing up, Eilis’s children don’t show much interest in learning about her old life back in Ireland. Share with your book club what you know about your parents’ early lives. When did you first take an interest in hearing about them? Consider taking this as an opportunity to learn more by speaking with family members and/or through genealogical research.
The following is a transcript of an interview with Sen. Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that aired on Oct. 6, 2024.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Joining us now is Arizona’s Democratic Senator, Mark Kelly. He’s in Detroit this morning on the campaign trail for the Harris campaign. Good morning to you, Senator.
SEN. MARK KELLY: Good morning, Margaret.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I want to talk to you about Arizona, but let’s start in Michigan, which is where you are right now. And it is going to be such a key state to a potential Harris or Trump victory. Vice President Harris is facing challenges among black men, working class people, as well as the Muslim and Arab populations skeptical of the White House support for Israel’s wars. What are you hearing on the ground there from voters?
SEN. KELLY: Well, my wife, Gabby Giffords, and I have been out here for a couple days. We’ve been campaigning across the country, Michigan, I’ve been in North Carolina, Georgia as well. I’ll be back to Arizona here soon. The vice president was out here speaking to Muslim organizations and the Arab community about what is at stake in this election and addressing the concerns that they have. What we’re hearing, issues about the economy, about gun violence, about, you know, supporting American families and the difference between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. You know, Kamala Harris, who has a vision for the future of this country, Donald Trump, who just wants to drag us backwards.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Today in Dearborn, Michigan, there’s a funeral service for an American man who was killed in Lebanon by an Israeli airstrike. It just underscores how that community you’re talking about out in Michigan feel some of what’s happening in a personal way to their community. Given how close this race is, do you think this war and the expectation it could escalate could cost Democrats both a seat in the Senate and potentially the presidency?
SEN. KELLY: Margaret, nobody wants to see escalation and it’s tragic when any innocent person, whether it’s an American or Palestinian, lose their life in a conflict. Tomorrow’s one year since October 7th, when Israel was violently attacked. Israel has a right to defend itself, not only from Hamas, but from Hezbollah and from the Iranians. But, you know, I and my wife, you know, we feel for the community here who’s been affected by this. And that’s why the vice president was out here earlier, a few days ago, meeting with that community.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But it’s a live issue.
SEN. KELLY: Yeah, sure. I mean, there is an ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Israel is, you know, fighting a war now on, I think it’s fair to say, two fronts and then being attacked by the Iranians as well. And, they- they need to defend themselves, and we need to support our Israeli ally. At the same time, when women and children lose their life, innocent people in a conflict, it is- it is tragic.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You do sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee and so I know you know how intense the efforts are by foreign actors to try to manipulate voters going into November. Just this Friday, Matthew Olsen, the lead on election threats at the Department of Justice, told CBS the Russians are, quote, highlighting immigration as a wedge issue. That is such a key issue in Arizona. Are you seeing targeted information operations really focusing in on Arizonans right now?
SEN. KELLY: Not only in Arizona, in other battleground states. It’s the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and it’s significant. And we need to do a better job getting the message out to the American people that there is a huge amount of misinformation. If you’re looking at stuff on Twitter, on TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram, and it’s political in nature, and you may- might think that that person responding to that political article or who made that meme up is an American. It could be- it could look like a U.S. service member. There is a very reasonable chance I would put it in the 20 to 30% range, that the content you are seeing, the comments you are seeing, are coming from one of those three countries: Russia, Iran, China. We had a hearing recently, with the FBI director, the DNI, and the head of the National Security Agency. And we talked about this. And we talked about getting the word out. And it’s up to us, so thank you for asking me the question, because it’s up to us, the people who serve in Congress and the White House to get the information out there, that there is a tremendous amount of misinformation in this election, and it’s not going to stop on November 5th.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Understood. And we will do our best to help parse that for viewers. But on the topic of the border, President Biden did announce just this past week new regulations to keep in place that partial asylum ban that he rolled out back in June. That’s what’s credited with helping to bring down some of the border crossing numbers in recent weeks. It was supposed to be a temporary policy, dependent on how many people were crossing at a time. Do you think this is the right long term policy, or is this just a gimmick to bring down numbers ahead of the election?
SEN. KELLY: Well, the right long term policy is to do this through legislation. And we were a day or two away from doing that, passing strong border security legislation supported by the vice president, negotiated by the vice president, and the president and his Department of Homeland Security, with Democrats and Republicans–
MARGARET BRENNAN: But this is not legislation.
SEN. KELLY: –This is bipartisan. This isn’t. But the legislation was killed by Donald Trump. We were really close to getting it passed. That’s the correct way to do this. When you can’t do that, Margaret, when a former president interrupts the legislative process the way he did, which is the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever seen in my three and a half years in the Senate. After that happened, the only other option is executive actions. And this has gone from what was chaos and a crisis at our southern border to somewhat manageable. And if you’re the border- Border Patrol, you know, this is this- you need this. I mean, otherwise it is unsafe for Border Patrol agents, for CBP officers, for migrants, for communities in southern Arizona. So it’s unfortunate that this was the- these were the steps that had to be taken.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Okay.
SEN. KELLY: But that’s because the former president didn’t allow us to do this through legislation.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator, we have to leave it right there. Face the Nation will be right back.
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Sen. Mark Kelly says Americans need to know about “huge amount of misinformation” on election
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