Meet Colm Toibin: Bestselling Irish Author

San Francisco's United Irish Cultural Center and Bookshop West Portal are thrilled to jointly host bestselling Irish author Colm Toibin live and in person. We are celebrating the release of Long Island, a stunning novel that revists characters from his beloved masterpiece Brooklyn.

Mr. Toibin will be in conversation with Ethel Rohan, San Francisco-based award-winning Irish author.

This event will take place at the United Irish Cultural Center at 2700 45th Ave.

• General Admission + Signed Copy of Long Island

includes admission for 1 attendee and 1 signed copy of Long Island for pick up at the event

**Your ticket purchase includes a hardcover, signed book that must be picked up at the event.

If you require shipping, or if you do not intend to attend the event, please use our website here to order the book.

• 1:15pm: Doors open

There is no assigned seating, so arrive promptly to collect your books and get your seats.

• 2:00pm: Author Talk
• 3:00pm: Signing Line - Author will personalize your book

• Pre-order additional copies of Long Island
• Snag copies of Mr. Toibin's many other titles!
• Get copies of Ms. Rohan's titles, including her latest book Sing, I

Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, a sequel to Brooklyn forthcoming from Scribner in May 2024, The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and has been named as the Laureate for Irish Fiction for 2022–2024 by the Arts Council of Ireland. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín's most popular work twenty years later.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony's parents, a huge extended family that lives and works, eats and plays together. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no one to rely on in this still-new country. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at his job and Eilis is in her home office doing her accounting, an Irishman comes to the door asking for her by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis's doorstep. It is what Eilis does--and what she refuses to do--in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín's novel so riveting.

Long Island is about longings unfulfilled, even unrecognized. The silences in Eilis' life are thunderous and dangerous, and there's no one more deft than Tóibín at giving them language. This is a gorgeous story of a woman alone in a marriage and the deepest bonds she rekindles on her return to the place and people she left behind, to ways of living and loving she thought she'd lost.

"An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work... Eilis' fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton...the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s. A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect."

--Kirkus Reviews, STARRED review

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

United Irish Cultural Center, 2700 45th Avenue, San Francisco, United States