Our Take: This charming, steady-paced story, twice listed for The Booker Prize, recounts the life of young Eilis Lacey who leaves her small Irish town to travel across the Atlantic to Brooklyn in post World War II in the 1950’s. In the 262 pages, you will hear of the horrendous ocean crossing, her depictions of life in America knowing no one, her boarding house, night school, new friends, tangible longing for her mother and sister, and life back home. The action picks up when the parish priest begins holding dances at the church hall on Friday nights. This subtle tale will linger in your memory long after the last paragraph is read.

A Few Good Lines:  All that seemed like nothing compared to the picture she had of home, of her own room, the house in Friary Street (in Ireland,) the food she had eaten there, the clothes she wore, how quiet everything was. She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor… The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there.