Colm Tóibín’s masterful Long Island is a welcome return to Eilish Lacey

Fiction

Novelist, playwright and poet Colm Tóibín has exceeded high expectations with his 'Brooklyn' sequel. Photo: Steve Humphreys

Luke Warde

Colm Tóibín is no fan of sequels. In fact, he “doesn’t think novelists should do them”, he told The New York Times Book Review podcast recently. Yet he has written one, prompted by an image that came to him, he said in the same podcast, suddenly, epiphanically. A disgruntled man knocks on a woman’s door to deliver some shocking news.

Her husband has got his wife pregnant, and he will under no circumstances be raising the “brat” in his home.