Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín begins in the early 1950s in a small Irish village, where we meet Eilis Lacey, a young woman on the brink of adulthood, living with her widowed mother and her older sister, Rose.  Contented, unassuming, and compliant, Eilis expects to live her life among her friends and family in the small village. But her well-meaning and high spirited sister is ambitious for her younger sister, so with the help of a former parish priest who has emigrated to the U.S., Rose arranges for Eilias to resettle in Brooklyn, New York. There she takes a room in a boarding house run by an Irishwoman with links to the old village. The priest lines up a job for Eilias as a sales girl in a department store, and helps her enroll in a business college, so that she can eventually get a more lucrative job as a bookkeeper.