Brooklyn
A love story about the irreversible choices that form a life. Eilis Lacey, emigrating from Ireland to New York, falling in love in both worlds and having to choose which love to keep. Toibin writes with restraint and deep feeling; the ending is not happy or unhappy so much as true, and truth is more resonant than either.
Eilis drifts. She emigrates because others arrange it, marries quietly, returns, nearly stays; the strongest current in the room decides her life, and Tóibín's celebrated restraint can read as a heroine with no pulse. The plot's hinge is a concealed marriage, and your sympathy depends on accepting that concealment through the whole final act. Quiet, yes. Sometimes inert.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
