Bookazine in Hong Kong will host an afternoon book-signing by prize-winning author Colm Tóibín with his latest book, Brooklyn, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. This Irish author visits Hong Kong to judge the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Brooklyn is a tender story of love, loss and the heartbreaking choice between personal freedom and duty. In a small Irish town in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey can’t find work at home. When a job is offered in America, she must go. Leaving her family and home, she sets off to forge a new life in Brooklyn. Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life -- days at the till in a large department store, night classes at Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the parish-hall dance floor. When tragic news summons her back to Ireland and reveals new possibilities, she faces a terrible choice: between love and happiness in the land where she belongs and the promises she must keep across the ocean.

Tóibín’s five novels also include The Master, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin and Princeton University, where he now teaches. A member of the Irish Arts Council, he contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

The book-signing takes place from 12:30 to 2 p.m. on November 16 at the Bookazine store in the Prince’s Building, Central, Hong Kong.

Colm Toibin visits to judge literary prize.