Eilis Lacey Books in Order

The Eilis Lacey books follow one woman across decades as she moves between Ireland and America, torn between duty, desire and the idea of home. Read together, Brooklyn and Long Island trace how a single decision to emigrate shapes an entire life.

In Brooklyn, Eilis is a quiet young woman in 1950s Enniscorthy who cannot find steady work. A priest visiting from New York arranges a sales job and a room in a Brooklyn boarding house, and Eilis is gently pushed to go. The novel stays close to her as she endures a rough Atlantic crossing, homesickness, loneliness at the shop counter and the small cruelties of boarding‑house life. Night classes, new friends and a slow, tender romance with Tony, an Italian‑American plumber, gradually open the city to her.

Just as Eilis begins to feel rooted in Brooklyn, tragedy in Ireland forces her to return home. There she slips back into old routines and expectations, and a local man, Jim Farrell, offers a very different future from the one waiting in New York. The book’s power lies in the quietness of her dilemma: no melodrama, just a young woman trying to decide which version of herself she can live with.

Long Island returns to Eilis about twenty years later. She is in her forties now, living in a Long Island enclave dominated by her husband Tony’s Italian‑American family, raising two teenagers in a row of nearly identical houses. The novel opens with a stranger at her door who claims Tony has made his wife pregnant and threatens to leave the baby on Eilis’s doorstep. The accusation rocks the apparently settled life Eilis has built.

Rather than explode, the book deepens. Eilis travels back to Enniscorthy for her mother’s eightieth birthday, bringing her children and leaving Tony to face his own family. Ireland is no longer the place she left: shops have changed, old friends run new businesses, and the country is edging into the 1970s. The story alternates between Eilis, her old friend Nancy and Jim Farrell, catching how their lives have knotted together in Eilis’s absence.

Across both books, Tóibín is less interested in big historical set‑pieces than in the small pressures that accumulate within families and towns. Brooklyn boarding houses, parish dances, Long Island kitchens and Enniscorthy pubs are the stages on which Eilis must keep remaking herself. Emigration here is not a single heroic act but an ongoing negotiation between memory and the present.

Readers can enjoy either novel on its own, but reading Brooklyn first and Long Island second lets you watch Eilis change from a tentative girl into a woman who finally pushes back against the plans others have made for her. The Eilis Lacey series offers a quietly devastating portrait of how love, class and geography shape a life, and how the question of where you belong rarely has a simple answer.