-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:An exquisite, heart-breaking novel by an Irish discovery.
Radiant with beauty, longing, and desire, and deeply touching, this literary novel, reminiscent of the works of William Trevor and Colm Tóibín, evokes the long love affair between a man and a woman, each married to another, who meet every month in a decaying hotel in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
On a bitterly cold winter's afternoon, Michael and Caitlin, two middle-aged lovers, escape their unhappy marriages to keep an illicit date. Once a month for the past quarter of a century, Coney Island has been their haven, the place in which they have abandoned themselves to their love.
These beautiful, carefully-rationed days have long sustained Michael and Caitlin's love, and have helped help them survive the tedium of their lives separate from each other. But now, amid the howling winds whipping off the Atlantic, and a snow storm blackening the horizon, this nearly abandoned resort feels like the edge of the world. On this winter day, burrowed in their private cocoon, they will discover that their lives are on the brink of change.
Michael's wife is battling cancer, and Caitlin's husband is about to receive a major promotion, which will involve relocating to the Midwest. After half a lifetime together in their most intimate moments, certain long-denied facts must be faced, decisions made, consequences weighed and, maybe, just maybe, chances finally taken.
A quiet, intense depiction of love and intimacy, My Coney Island Baby reveals, within the course of a single day's passing, the histories, landscapes, tragedies and occasional moments of wonder that constitute the lives of two people who, although living worlds apart, have been inexorably drawn together. But even in this most private of retreats, a place seemingly built for romance, the most heartbreaking of realities loom.
He writes steadfast descriptions of the natural world bearing down hard on the two lovers on this particular harsh day. And it's not only nature that gets this treatment, Michael and Caitlin's emotional lives get it as well, which, in turn, taps into our emotional lives, making this novel not just a read, but an experience too – because O'Callaghan's text basically says: "Follow me softly. I will also tell you the story of your life here."..continued
Full Review
(645 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Rory L. Aronsky).
Here we are, at the famed Coney Island in Brooklyn, through the eyes of Billy O'Callaghan in his novel My Coney Island Baby. The air is "mean with cold." Snow's coming, so along Surf Avenue, past Nathan's Hot Dogs, "most of the stores along here are shuttered…some closed for the season, others having already written off the day as a bad debt." It's cold here. The rising, relentless wind "gusts and swirls." Not a season for beachgoers to dash down the promenade, seeking the magic that Coney Island is famous for. O'Callaghan points out the ocean. As he sees it: "The horizon line has been rubbed away and there is nothing beyond the loose logic of suggestion to differentiate between water and sky."
Nothing but gray. What can we do to ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked My Coney Island Baby, try these:
by Graham Swift
Published 2017
A luminous, intensely moving tale that begins with a secret lovers' assignation in the spring of 1924, then unfolds to reveal the whole of a remarkable life.
by Lily Tuck
Published 2012
Slender, potent, and utterly engaging, I Married You For Happiness combines marriage, mathematics, and the probability of an afterlife to create Tuck's most affecting and riveting book yet.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
