The love story of the century
Long Island by Colm Tóibín, the author of Brooklyn, is his masterpiece: an exquisite, exhilarating novel that asks whether it is possible to truly return to the past and renew the great love that seemed gone forever.

The Sunday Times bestseller & Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month

A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island. In that moment, everything changes. This stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created.

For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind.

Did she make the wrong choice all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?

From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work in twenty years.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis’s life are thunderous and dangerous, and there’s no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she’d lost.

Novelist and critic Colm Toibin explores the relationships of writers with their families and their work in the brilliant, nuanced, and wholly original "New Ways to Kill Your Mother."
Toibin--celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays--traces the intriguing, often twisted family ties of writers in the books they leave behind.
Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, Jane Austen and her aunts, and Tennessee Williams and his sister, Toibin examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in their implications. Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, "New Ways to Kill Your Mother "is a fascinating look at writers' most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their work.

It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time. Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love.

In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish emigre in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew.
The South is a novel of classic themes--of art and exile, and of the seemingly irreconcilable yearnings for love and freedom--to which Colm Toibin brings a new, passionate sensitivity.

Helen’s beloved brother Declan is dying. Now, she must join her mother and grandmother in a crumbling old house by the sea, three generations calling an uneasy truce after years of strife, to be by his side.

Together with Declan’s friends, who know more about him than any family, they must all deal with the past and come to terms with each other.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabea, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabea loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabea is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macabea heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator-edge of despair to edge of despair-and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, "The Master," Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view.

Known for his acuity and originality, Toibin is himself a master of fiction and critical works, which makes this collection of his writings on Henry James essential reading for literary critics. But he also writes for general readers. Until now, these writings have been scattered in introductions, essays in the "Dublin Times," reviews in the "New York Review of Books," and other disparate venues.

With humor and verve, Toibin approaches Henry James's life and work in many and various ways. He reveals a novelist haunted by George Eliot and shows how thoroughly James was a New Yorker. He demonstrates how a new edition of Henry James's letters along with a biography of James's sister-in-law alter and enlarge our understanding of the master. His "Afterword" is a fictional meditation on the written and the unwritten.

Toibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.

In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.

In The Master Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.

It is a powerful account of the hazards of putting the life of the mind before affairs of the heart.

Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing details the life of Eamon Redmond, a judge in Ireland’s high court, a man remote from his wife, his son and daughter and, at least outwardly, from his own childhood.

The life he has built for himself, between his work in Dublin and his family’s retreat by the sea at Cush, is distinguished by order and by achievement.

When, like his beloved coastline, it begins to slip away, he is pulled sharply into the present, and finds himself revisiting his past.

A stunning collection of nine stories that teases out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons.

Mothers and Sons is a sensitive meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive, each story focuses on a moment in which an unspoken balance shifts; in which a mother or son do battle, or experience a sudden crisis, thus leaving their conception of who they are subtly or seriously altered.

This is an acute, masterful and moving collection that confirms Colm Tóibín as a great prose stylist of our time.

Richard Garay lives alone with his mother in Buenos Aires, hiding his sexuality from her and the world. Stifled by a job he despises, he finds himself willing to take considerable risks.

Set in Argentina in a time of great change, The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín is a powerful and moving novel about sex, death, and a man who, as the Falklands War is fought and lost, finds his own way to emerge into the world.

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is a devastating story of love, loss and one woman's terrible choice between duty and personal freedom. The book that inspired the major motion picture starring Saoirse Ronan. It is Ireland in the early 1950s and for Eilis Lacey, as for so many young Irish girls, opportunities are scarce. So when her sister arranges for her to emigrate to New York, Eilis knows she must go, leaving behind her family and her home for the first time. Arriving in a crowded lodging house in Brooklyn, Eilis can only be reminded of what she has sacrificed. She is far from home - and homesick. And just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland. There she will be confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love. *** 'With this elating and humane novel, Colm Toibin has produced a masterwork' Sunday Times 'Unforgettable' Spectator 'The most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman I have read in a long time' Zoe Heller Guardian, Books of the Year 'Magnificent' Sunday Telegraph 'A work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt your life' Ali Smith TLS, Books of the Year When you are finished why not read the companion novel Nora Webster.

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem and France, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.

A Guest at the Feast uncovers the places where politics and poetics meet, where life and fiction overlap, where one can be inside writing and also outside of it. From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Toibin delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson's fiction. The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Toibin himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self. 'Toibin's voice is so powerful and distinct, his descriptions so precise, that a single thread does weave through each of these pieces and does not snap . . . perhaps Ireland's greatest living male writer' Sunday Times 'An unsurprisingly erudite, gracefully written unpicking of the world' Independent

A modern classic work of Irish literature, this award-winning novel is an exploration of love, art and identity.

Katherine Proctor has dared to leave her family in Ireland and reach out for a new life. Determined to become an artist, she flees to Spain, where she meets Miguel, a passionate man who has fought for his own freedoms. They retreat to the quiet intensity of the mountains and begin to build a life together. But as Miguel’s past catches up with him, Katherine too is forced to re-examine her relationships: with her lover, her painting and the homeland she only thought she knew. . .

The South is the book that introduced readers to the astonishing gifts of Colm Tóibín, winning the Irish Times First Fiction Award in 1991.

This biography redefines the woman George Bernard Shaw once described as "the greatest living Irishwoman" - Augusta Gregory. A remarkable figure in Celtic history, she was married to an MP and land-owner, yet retained an unprecedented independence of both thought and deed, actively championing causes close to her heart.

Winner of the David Cohen Prize for Literature 2021. From the highly acclaimed author of Brooklyn, Colm Toibin's first collection of poetry explores sexuality, religion and belonging through a modern lens. Fans of Colm Toibin's novels, including The Magician, The Master and Nora Webster, will relish the opportunity to re-encounter Toibin in verse. Vinegar Hill explores the liminal space between private experiences and public events as Toibin examines a wide range of subjects - politics, queer love, reflections on literary and artistic greats, living through COVID, memory and a fading past, and facing mortality. The poems reflect a life well-travelled and well-lived; from growing up in the town of Enniscorthy, wandering the streets of Dublin and Barcelona, and crossing the bridges of Venice to visiting the White House, readers will travel through familiar locations and new destinations through Toibin's unique lens. Within this rich collection of poems written over the course of several decades, shot through with keen observation, emotion and humour, Toibin offers us lines and verses to provoke, ponder and cherish.

This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, "The Master," Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view.

Known for his acuity and originality, Toibin is himself a master of fiction and critical works, which makes this collection of his writings on Henry James essential reading for literary critics. But he also writes for general readers. Until now, these writings have been scattered in introductions, essays in the "Dublin Times," reviews in the "New York Review of Books," and other disparate venues.

With humor and verve, Toibin approaches Henry James's life and work in many and various ways. He reveals a novelist haunted by George Eliot and shows how thoroughly James was a New Yorker. He demonstrates how a new edition of Henry James's letters along with a biography of James's sister-in-law alter and enlarge our understanding of the master. His "Afterword" is a fictional meditation on the written and the unwritten.

Toibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.

Eamon Redmond is a judge in Ireland's high court, a completely legal creature who is just beginning to discover how painfully unconnected he is from other human beings. With effortless fluency, Colm Toibin reconstructs the history of Eamon's relationships--with his father, his first "girl," his wife, and the children who barely know him--and he writes about Eamon's affection for the Irish coast with such painterly skill that the land itself becomes a character. The result is a novel of stunning power, "seductive and absorbing" (USA Today).

Penguin Readers is an ELT graded reader series for learners of English as a foreign language. With carefully adapted text, new illustrations and language learning exercises, the print edition also includes instructions to access supporting material online. Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction, introducing language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content. The eight levels of Penguin Readers follow the Common European Framework of Reference for language learning (CEFR). Exercises at the back of each Reader help language learners to practise grammar, vocabulary, and key exam skills. Before, during and after-reading questions test readers' story comprehension and develop vocabulary. Brooklyn, a Level 5 Reader, is B1 in the CEFR framework. The text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing present perfect continuous, past perfect, reported speech and second conditional. It is well supported by illustrations, which appear regularly. When Eilis gets a job in Brooklyn, New York, she leaves her family in Ireland to travel to a new country. It is an exciting adventure, with lots of new people and things to learn, but Eilis misses Ireland. When she meets someone special, Eilis must choose between her past and her future. Visit the Penguin Readers website Exclusively with the print edition, readers can unlock online resources including a digital book, audio edition, lesson plans and answer keys.