Brooklyn
Colm Tóibín

Narrated By: Niamh Cusack

Duration: 8 hours and 36 minutes

What to expect

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Brooklyn by Colm Toibin, read by Niamh Cusack.

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.

Genre

Modern & contemporary fiction, Historical fiction, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Sense of place

Listen to a sample

No book this year gave me greater pleasure

Brooklyn moved me more than any other book this year

Remarkable freshness and immediacy ... with a lovely comedic lightness

A work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt your life

The most compelling and moving portrait of a young woman I have read in a long time

A beautifully crafted work that transformed ordinary lives into something extraordinary

Tremendously moving and powerful

With this elating and humane novel, Colm Tóibín has produced a masterwork

Not a sentence or a thought out of place. It takes over as his finest fiction to date

Suffused with humane depth, funny, affecting, deftly plotted ... a novel of magnificent accomplishment

A lovely, thoughtful book ... alive with authentic detail, moved along by the ripples of affection and doubt that shape any life: a novel that offers the reader serious pleasure