Colm Tóibín's new novel is a meditation on the story of Irish emmigration. It is the 1950s, in Tóibín's birthplace, Enniscorthy. Times are quietly desperate, jobs are scarce and dignity is struggling to survive. Eilis Lacey is the youngest daughter, home with her sister Rose and her mother: three brothers have gone to England, the father has passed away. Difficult choices of survival have to be made. Nothing but the same old story: sadness, melancholy, bitterness, the quiet acceptance of the inevitability of the leaving. A story of Ireland that, sadly, is still being played.

Eilis Lacey is an intelligent, loving and aware young woman. She is willing to accept, for the benefit of her family, and perhaps herself, the necessity to leave for the promises of that faraway west, America. And so she goes to Brooklyn, with the encouragement and assistance of a Catholic priest, as did generations of her countryfolk before her.

In Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín writes about his home town and his country with a love and awareness of history. His writing and this story, is full of that quiet strength which always touches my heart. The complexity of the seemingly ordinary, written with Toibin's clear calm prose, recommended with a glass of Jamiesons – and perhaps a tissue – at hand.