TÓIBÍN, Colm. Brooklyn. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2016.

Octavo. Full brown leather. Covers elaborately blocked in gilt with a design of a young woman carrying a suitcase. Spine with four raised bands, gilt tooling of the Brooklyn Bridge, a transatlantic liner, and the figure of a woman with suitcase; title in gilt. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. [viii], 262 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Signed Modern Classics series. Signed by the author on the special leaf preceding the title page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, Collector's Notes, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published London: Viking, 2009.

Colm Tóibín (b. 1955) was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, and has been one of the most distinguished Irish novelists of his generation for more than thirty years. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times — for The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004), and Nora Webster (2014) — and was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature in 2021, the most significant lifetime achievement award in British and Irish letters. He served as Laureate for Irish Fiction from 2022 to 2024. His eleven novels constitute one of the most consistently achieved bodies of work in contemporary fiction, and Brooklyn, published in 2009, is the novel by which he is most widely known.

The novel is set in the early 1950s. Eilis Lacey is a young woman from a small town in County Wexford — a place Tóibín knows intimately, having grown up there — for whom there is no future in Ireland. Her sister Rose arranges for her to emigrate to Brooklyn, where a sympathetic priest has secured her a place to live and a job in a department store. The novel follows Eilis's first years in New York: her homesickness, her gradual adaptation to American life, her evening classes in bookkeeping, and her growing attachment to Tony Fiorello, a young Italian-American plumber. When a family crisis recalls her to Ireland, she finds herself confronted with a choice — between the life she has built in Brooklyn and the life that has continued, and changed, without her at home — that Tóibín renders with a precision and a restraint that are entirely characteristic of his method.

Brooklyn won the Costa Novel Award in 2009 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. John Crowley's 2015 film adaptation, written by Nick Hornby and starring Saoirse Ronan in the title role, was nominated for three Academy Awards and brought the novel an enormous new audience. The 2024 publication of Long Island, Tóibín's sequel — following Eilis twenty years later — has brought renewed attention to the original novel, which remains in print and in wide readership.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000592