Colm Toibin's novel "Brooklyn" is at once a classic narrative of the immigrant's conflicted passions and allegiances and a story of female self-questioning that transcends the immigrant-lit genre. It offers a New York that is both a grand escape and a small town.

"Brooklyn" is the story of a young Irishwoman named Eilis Lacey whose bookkeeping classes in an Irish village are interrupted when a priest living across the Atlantic sponsors her passage to New York, a voyage that submerges her in the world of Bartucci's department store on Fulton Street and an Italian-American culture that slowly tempts her away from her own.

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Source: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com