The sequel to the prize-winning, bestselling novel Brooklyn. A novel of enormous wit and profound emotional resonance from one of the world's finest writers. In Colm Toibin's masterful new novel, we are reunited with Eilis Lacey, the heroine of Brooklyn, twenty years on, in the 1970s, living with her husband, Tony Fiorello, and her children in a house in Long Island, rather too close to her Fiorello in-laws.
In breathless prose, Declan Toohey weaves a contemporary yarn of academic intrigue and youthful irreverence, sexual fluidity and neurodiversity. Experimental, trippy, hilarious, compassionate, Perpetual Comedown is a riotous reckoning in the construction of the self.
When Albert Jackson, a middle-aged school teacher, catches a glimpse of the infinite universe and his own tiny insignificance he cannot shake himself free of regret for a life all but squandered. In a blind and demented attempt to salvage something from his life, he sets off, half-lucidly, on a mission to reclaim life, to live it on his terms.
It is summer and a stranger has come to quiet Rathmoye. He is noticed by Ellie, the young convent girl, who is married to Dillahan, a farmer still mourning his first wife. Over the long and warm days, Ellie and the stranger form an illicit attachment.
A title in which, a waiter divulges a shocking life of crime to his ex-wife; a woman repeats the story of her parents' unstable marriage after a horrible tragedy; a schoolgirl regrets gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her; and, a middle-aged accountant offers his reasons for ending a love affair.
Summer, 1921. Eight-year-old Lucy Gault clings to glens and woods above Lahardane - the home her family is being forced to abandon. She knows Gaults are no longer welcome in Ireland and that danger threatens. Lucy, however, is headstrong and decides that somehow she must force her parents into staying. But the path she chooses ends in disaster.