Readers last encountered Eilis Lacey in Colm Tóibín's best-known work, Brooklyn (2009). In Long Island, the author returns to his enigmatic heroine in 1976, twenty years after events in the earlier novel. Eilis is now in her 40s, and married with two teenagers. Her house is one of four in a Long Island cul-de-sac, the others populated by her husband's parents and his two brothers with their large families. She hasn't returned to Ireland since 1956, and her mother hasn't visited. Although Eilis finds the closeness of the extended family claustrophobic at times, she's content with her life, working as an accountant from her home office and caring for her husband and children.

All this changes one morning when a man Eilis has never met appears at her home. He claims his wife is pregnant with her husband's child, and when it is born he intends to deposit the child on Eilis's ...