Brooklyn [With Earbuds]

From the author of The Master, a moving novel about a young immigrant in 1950s Brooklyn torn between her Irish roots and the man who wins her heart.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Small towns everywhere can seem like stage sets in the theater of respectability. Sidewalks are washed, the facades are painted, the performers go to church in their Sunday best. But in fiction, such towns fester with whispery gossip, small betrayals, hidden hypocrisies, petty tyrannies, and calculated arrangements of everything from jobs to marriages. The residents could be living in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, or in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, in the Republic of Ireland.

Enniscorthy is a real town (today's population: about 3,700), located on the River Slaney, dominated by St. Aidan's Cathedral. It's the homeplace of the fine Irish novelist Colm Toíbín and has inspired much of his fiction. But in his previous novel, The Master (2004), Toíbín gave us, to high critical applause, a portrait of Henry James and lived imaginatively in London, Paris, Rome, and Florence. In Brooklyn, he returns to Enniscorthy.

He s written newspaper columns, travelogues, a history of the Irish Famine, and an examination of the Catholic Church in Europe, but Colm Tóibín is known primarily, in the words of one critic, as a novelist with a spare style and compressed but powerful prose that owes as much to the American writer Raymond Carver as it does to any modern Irish writer.