Loved “Long Island”? Check Out Colm Tóibín’s Other Novels

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The prolific author of the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick, Long Island, published his first novel at the age of 35. Since then, he has published a dozen more books of fiction, 10 books of nonfiction, a poetry collection, three plays, an opera libretto, and, by his own estimate, “thousands” of articles. He has written from the perspective of the Virgin Mary and about his own harrowing battle with testicular cancer. But there some themes—and places—that the author keeps returning to and that readers of Long Island will recognize: his Irish hometown of Enniscorthy, the search for home and people to share it with, and the subtle workings of the human heart.

Read on for a selection of Tóibín’s novels that just might fill that Long Island–shaped hole in your life.

Brooklyn

If you read Long Island without realizing that it’s technically a sequel to Tóibín’s 2009 bestseller, don’t worry; the two books in the “Eilis Lacey series” don’t need to be read in order—but reading them together deepens and expands both stories. In Brooklyn, we meet Eilis as a young woman leaving behind everything and everyone she has ever known to make a new life in America. She eventually finds more than her footing in this new country, falling in love with an impossibly sweet Italian American plumber. If you’ve read the first few pages of Long Island, you know how that one turns out, but even seeing Eilis and Tony’s relationship in dramatic midlife disarray doesn’t take away from the magic of watching it bloom in their youth. If anything, this longer vantage adds a poignantly human layer to the initial love story. The multiple-Oscar-nominated 2015 film starring Saoirse Ronan also captures the chemistry—and the city—perfectly.

Nora Webster

Fans of Long Island and Brooklyn will recognize the setting (and even a few characters!) in Tóibín’s seventh novel, which centers around a mother who is rebuilding her life after her husband’s sudden death. Though the novel is fiction, Tóibín drew heavily from his experience living with his mother and siblings in Enniscorthy after his own schoolteacher father died (the same year as the fictional father in the novel). He began writing the novel in 2000, and got the idea for Brooklyn from a few sentences he wrote in the first chapter. He published Brooklyn—along with another novel, a biography, two collections of short stories, and two plays—before finishing Nora Webster. “It seemed in all these books that I was circling the story that was Nora Webster’s, working out ways of writing about family and loss and trauma,” he told The Guardian.

The Master

In this International Dublin Literary Award–winning novel, Tóibín tells an intimately fictionalized account of four transformational years (1895 to 1899, to be exact) in the life of the writer Henry James. While the time frame the novel covers is short, the ground it covers is immense. Through James’s flashbacks and his travels to various European cities, Tóibín captures a whole lifetime of repressed homosexuality, fraternal competition, and creative genius all in a handful of years and a few hundred pages.

The Magician

In his highly acclaimed 12th novel, Tóibín once again imagines his way into the mind of a famous literary giant, this time covering the entire life of the Nobel Peace Prize–winning author Thomas Mann. Although Mann’s own writing (The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice) is sometimes criticized as dense or overly intellectual, Tóibín treatment of his life is propulsive and emotional. He writes achingly (again) of Mann’s alleged closeted homosexuality and epically of the sweep of history this German author’s life straddles, which includes the Munich revolution, both World Wars, Nazi exile, and the Cold War. In these pages, Mann comes to life not as a literary hero but as a flawed and relatable human being caught in the complexities of his own private life and national history.

The Blackwater Lightship

Tóibín’s fourth novel—a Booker Prize finalist—is a story about family secrets and fraught reunion set against the backdrop of the early 1990s HIV/AIDS crisis. Like Long Island, this book hinges on a stranger appearing at a woman’s doorstep to deliver earth-shattering news. Helen, a mother and school principal, is informed that her brother, Declan, is dying in a Dublin hospital as a result of AIDS, a diagnosis he has hidden from her for years. He wants to spend his final days in their “real paint cleaner” of a grandmother’s seaside cottage, along with his sister, their estranged mother, and two of his closest gay friends. Predictably, clashes ensue: between old and young, gay and straight, city slickers and country mice. But just as the cliffside geography outside the house is reshaped by the pounding of the sea, the tumult inside the home eventually carves out a new landscape for forgiveness, love, and redemption.

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