Colm Tóibín meets the Guardian book club

Colm Tóibín visited the Guardian book club last month to talk about his novel Brooklyn, the story of a young Irishwoman emigrating to the United States soon after the second world war. He talked about how, although the novel takes place in a relatively remote era, it was partly inspired by watching new arrivals in Dublin – from China, Poland, Nigeria – and registering their "in-between" condition, having left their home countries behind without fully arriving in the new culture. He also discussed the appeal of a story set in a repressed milieu, "the system of silence" where things sometimes cannot even be consciously felt, let alone spoken of, by the characters, but are understood by the reader. He also explains how – in search of the "felt life" – bypassed some of the more obvious events in his story.