A Conversation With Colm Tóibín

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Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel “Brooklyn” told the story of a meek young Irishwoman, Eilis Lacey, who emigrates to New York in the 1950s out of a sense of familial obligation and slowly, diligently begins building a new life for herself. A New York Times best seller, the book was also adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Saoirse Ronan — and now, 15 years after its publication, Tóibín has surprised himself by writing a sequel.

“Long Island,” his new novel, finds Eilis relocated to the suburbs and, in the opening scene, confronting a sudden crisis in her marriage. On this week’s podcast, Tóibín talks to Sarah Lyall about the book and how he came to write it.

“Many people, including me, really loved those characters,” Lyall says of “Brooklyn” and its reception. “And I feel like, when that book ended, they were on a sort of gentle sea, sailing off to a really happy future, and now you’ve just added, like, a hurricane and a sea monster and all sorts of other things into their lives and really shaken them up in a way that’s quite upsetting. Why did you want to come back to them? And why did you want to do this to them?”

“There was no want involved,” Tóibín replies. “It was merely, that scene came to me as something exact, and it was with those same people. … In a way, I wasn’t thinking about the last book at all. It was, What I was going to do now that I had smashed the afternoon for her? What would I do to her now? How would she recover? How would she manage? I had the character already, but now I had a new story.”

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