The Irish actor’s nuanced narration captures the conflicting emotions in Tóibín’s tale of infidelity, homecoming and the roads not taken

At the start of Long Island, a stranger appears at Eilis Fiorello’s front door and informs her that his wife is expecting a baby and he will be bringing it to her house once it’s born. Why? Because the child has been fathered by Eilis’s husband, Tony. “And you can tell your husband from me,” the man adds, “that if I ever see his face anywhere, I’ll come after him with an iron bar.”

The sequel to Colm Tóibín’s mega-selling, Booker-longlisted 2009 novel Brooklyn, Long Island is set 20 years after its predecessor. Eilis, from County Wexford in Ireland (where Tóibín grew up), had moved to America and married in secret, leaving behind a local man, Jim, for whom she carried a torch. Now it is the mid-1970s and Eilis, a bookkeeper, has two teenage children with Tony, a plumber of Italian descent. Eilis had left Ireland in part to escape small-town life, though now she is similarly stifled by her interfering in-laws, who live next door.