The Seventies! The decade of flares, chevron moustaches and disco. Well forget all that. In Long Island, Colm Tóibín’s sequel to Fifties-set Brooklyn, it’s frosted glass doors, Vietnam protests on the tele and people suddenly trying to give up ciggies after years of carefree chain-smoking that indicate we have skipped forward two decades

Brooklyn, which was further popularized by the eponymous 2015 movie starring Saoirse Ronan, concerns a young Irish immigrant torn between her new home and her old one in the 1950s. Eilis Lacey, recently sent to America by her family for better prospects, returns to Enniscorthy in County Wexford, her hometown and Tóibín’s, for the funeral of her beloved older sister. Her mother, alone now that Rose is dead, doesn’t want Eilis to leave. But Eilis can’t bring herself to tell her – or anyone, including the man with whom she strikes up a romance – that she’s married to an Italian-American plumber she met at a dance in Brooklyn. Tóibín returns to find Eilis (now Fiorello) settled with Tony, their two kids, and their extended family living in a commune on Long Island. How sweet, how boring. Well, Tóibín thought so too, so in the opening pages he chucks a narrative grenade at beloved protagonist Eilis that blows up her world and gets the book going

One day Eilis answers the door and encounters a stranger who tells her that her husband, Tony, a plumber, “did a bit more than was in the estimate … and his plumbing is so good that [the man’s wife] is to have a baby in August.” As soon as the child is born, the man says, he will deposit it on the Fiorellos’ doorstep

The problem, among others, is that Eilis will not have the baby in her house either

Tony’s family have always viewed Eilis as an outsider. To escape the tremendous pressure from them to accept this child, Eilis decides to absent herself when the baby is due by returning to Ireland for the first time in more than 20 years. She arranges for her two teenage children, Rosella and Larry, to join her in time for the 80th birthday of the grandmother they’ve never met. Everyone in Enniscorthy finds Eilis profoundly changed, “like a different person.” She tells no one why she’s there, including her testy mother, who lets Eilis know how insulting she finds her daughter’s patronizing attempts to fix up her home after such a long absence

When Eilis stops in to see her former best friend, Nancy Sheridan, widowed for five years, neither woman is open about what’s going on in their lives. Nancy, not wanting to overshadow her daughter’s upcoming wedding, is keeping her impending engagement to Jim Sheridan, the pub owner whom Eilis jilted 25 years ago without an explanation, under wraps for the time being

There are so many questions. What will Tony do? What about his family, living in each other’s pockets? Will Eilis and Jim rekindle their romance? If so, what does that mean for Nancy? The tension of not knowing is intense, for the reader as well as the characters, who seem as uncertain as we are about their next moves. The suspense is amplified by the way Tóibín deftly balances the story between the forces of secrecy and revelation. Eilis tells no one, including her mother, about her predicament. Jim and Nancy tell no one about their relationship. Eilis’ mother and daughter are both silent on the pieces of the puzzle that have come into their possession

Against all this withholding, gossip – never-ending, omnipresent — relentlessly works away. Sometimes it’s deliberate, even malicious, but mostly it’s a matter of all of Enniscorthy, like the Fiorello family in their cul-de-sac, living in longtime, complicated juxtaposition to each other’s lives. They are all in the same story, in a sense that transcends the narrative of a novel. “Sure, everyone knows everything,” as one of Eilis’ brothers tells another. Even the withholding of gossip has a place in the plot. “I made a decision early in life not to be a gossip,” Eilis’ mother tells her. “And it has always stood to me.” Meanwhile, what she could’ve said might have changed everything

As always, Tóibín’s narrative restraint heightens tension and allows readers to fill in the blanks. We marvel at his skill as we watch his characters in Long Island become ensnared in the elaborate web of strategically withheld information and calculated partial truths he has them spin

Long Island is more suspenseful and gripping than Brooklyn – the final 50 pages build to a nail-biting conclusion – and it feels more morally and psychologically meaty. As brilliantly as Tóibín evokes Eilis and her situation, she is a frustrating character, at times cold and passive, so it’s refreshing to experience her indecisiveness through the eyes of Jim and Nancy. Engrossing, truthful and humane, it’s a magnificent achievement