Two lovers, two countries, one ambitious girl

Brooklyn, by Irish author Colm Tóibín, was published in 2009 and won that year’s Costa Novel Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.

Now as a movie starring Saoirse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters, is was a critical success at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and is nominated for a number of Academy Awards.

Young Eilis Lacey dreams of life beyond the confines of her tiny Irish village, but unlike her beautiful sister, Rose, Eilis’ gifts are of a more practical nature: she has a head for numbers  and is a loving and dutiful daughter.

Yet her ambition cannot be hidden and soon is noted by the Parish Priest, Father Flood. Via a church contact, he arranges for Eilis to travel to America where a job opportunity has arisen in New York with a reputable “merchant of Italian origin”.

Eilis finds lodgings in an eccentric boarding house and ekes out an existence in the cosmopolitan melting pot that is 1950s Brooklyn, impressing her employer, outwitting her landlady, and even falling in love. It seems her dream is truly becoming a reality.

But then fate intervenes: a family crisis back home forces Eilis to make a choice between the past and the future, the old world and the new.

Told with a masterful and elegant simplicity, Brooklyn is a sublime Trans-Atlantic coming-of-age story by one of the UK’s greatest living writers.

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín is available now from Dymocks.