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BookBrowse Reviews Brooklyn: With deft prose and subtle characterization, Colm Toibin contemplates whether anyone can ever really return home

Brooklyn
A Novel
by Colm Toibin
Hardcover, May 2009,
272 pages.
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I had heard of Colm Tóibín, twice shortlisted for the Mann Booker Prize and author of the critically lauded The Master, but had never read any of his books until I happened across his latest. Largely, Brooklyn is about the immigrant experience and the difficulties of returning home, but it is also a novel about one woman's maturation, her change from a person living in the shadows to one fully experiencing life.

Brooklyn follows the experience of Eilis Lacy, an ordinary Irish girl from the small town of Enniscorthy. Almost without her knowing it, she is packed off to the United States. Her sister Rose, the organizer of the family, seems to understand that Eilis will come to nothing if she sticks around the small town, so she arranges with an Irish-American priest, and resident of Brooklyn, to send her sister to the States....
Beyond the Book
Like Eilis, Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland. Born in 1955, he was the second youngest of five children. He graduated from University College Dublin in 1975 and promptly moved to Barcelona for three years. His experiences in Spain informed his first novel The South (1990). Tóibín returned to Ireland to pursue a masters but never matriculated. He left academia for a career in journalism, and was editor of the prominent Irish news magazine Macgill from 1982 to 1985. He has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton and Stanford Universities, among others, and currently lives in...
This review is from the June 10, 2009 issue of BookBrowse Recommends. Click here to go to this issue.
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