VENUE CHANGE: Colm Tóibín

×

Expand

Reynaldo Rivera

A close-up of Colm Tóibín.

Colm Tóibín

This is a huge get for the Wisconsin Book Festival. Irish novelist Colm Tóibín has written 11 novels, including 2024’s Long Island — the continuing story of Irishwoman Eilis Lacey, who is married to plumber Tony Fiorello and one of four Italian-American brothers who all live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island. It is the New York Times bestselling sequel to Tóibín’s award-winning 2009 novel Brooklyn and was an Oprah’s Book Club pick. The man has been hailed as “simply one of the world’s best living literary writers” by The Boston Globe and was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize three times. Long Island recently was released in paperback, and all attendees will receive a pre-signed copy, courtesy of the Wisconsin Book Festival and the Madison Public Library Foundation.

April 9 update:  Please note this event will be held at the Overture Center Capitol Theater. 

media release: 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. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. 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 work an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis 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 and suspenseful.