I loved Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn so I was most pleased to be able to offer Australian readers five in-season double passes to the film adaptation, described as an ‘immaculately crafted, immensely moving character study about a 1950s immigrant struggling to find her place in the world’.

Competition winners came from all over Australia: Mt Lawley, Western Australia, Menzies Creek in Victoria, and Marrickville, Balmain, and Kiama in New South Wales. Even if you missed out you should still try to catch Brooklyn at your nearest participating cinema.

Opening in Australian cinemas on February 11, the film was directed by John Crowley, with a script written by Nick Hornby.

It stars Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson and Emory Cohen and follows Eilis Lacey (Ronan), a young Irish woman who leaves her small town in Ireland hoping for a bright future in 1950s Brooklyn. Despite her homesickness she falls in love with Tony, an Italian-American who opens her eyes to her new surroundings. But a family tragedy leads Eilis back to Ireland and she must choose between two countries and the lives that exist within.

Watch the trailer for the film.

Tóibín’s 2009 novel Brooklyn won the 2009 Costa Novel Award, was shortlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of the ten best historical novels.

Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times said, ‘In Brooklyn, Colm Toibin quietly, modestly shows how place can assert itself, enfolding the visitor, staking its claim.’

Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post said, ‘Tóibín’s prose is graceful but never showy, and his characters are uniformly interesting and believable. As a study of the quest for home and the difficulty of figuring out where it really is, Brooklyn has a universality that goes far beyond the specific details of Eilis’s struggle.’

Robert Hanks for The Daily Telegraph said, ‘Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn is a controlled, understated novel, devoid of outright passion or contrivance, but alive with authentic detail, moved along by the ripples of affection and doubt that shape any life: a novel that offers the reader serious pleasure.’

The film reviews are just as glowing.

Said Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post, ‘The exquisite adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel about a young Irish woman immigrating to the United States in the early 1950s dispenses with trendy flourishes and sniffy commentary to deliver the kind of movie that Hollywood rarely makes anymore: a sincere, unabashedly tender coming-of-age tale that, for all its deep feeling and wrenching twists and turns, never gives in to sentimentality or maudlin theatrics.’

Steven Zeitchik in The Los Angeles Times said, ‘The finished film is a manifestation of its two writers’ aesthetics: It blends the surprising melancholy of a Hornby work with the thematic investigations of a Tóibín one.’

Glenn Kenny for RogerEbert.com said of the book: ‘The story is simple, and told in a quiet register. Tóibín, who recently wrote a book celebrating the work of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, has both a novelist’s love of detail and a poet’s facility for linguistic magic-by-compression. He uses every word carefully, and every sentence is where it is for a very particular reason; therefore he’s able to weigh those sentences with intimations that are genuinely metaphysical.’

And of the film: ‘The persistent feeling that this movie so beautifully creates is that even when the world is bestowing blessings upon us, it’s still at the bottom a sad place, and the key to an emotionally healthy existence involves some rooted acceptance of that …

‘People have spoken about how understated and old-fashioned Brooklyn is, to the extent that it might come across as a pleasant innocuous entertainment. Don’t be fooled. Brooklyn is not toothless. But it is big-hearted, romantic and beautiful.’

Apparently Tóibín likes the film.

The heroine of his novel Brooklyn comes from the town of Enniscorthy in the south east of Ireland, where Tóibín was born.

He said when the film producers told him that they were going to shoot the Enniscorthy scenes in the very streets where they happened, ‘I wondered if they knew what this meant.

‘It meant that they would find a way for the Athenaeum to be reopened and they would shoot the dance scene in the very place where my father ran dances. They would shoot the wedding scene in the cathedral where I went to mass all through my childhood.

‘They would shoot the scenes where Eilis walks through the town, first as a young Irishwoman, and then as a returned emigrant, in the very John Street and Court Street that I had imagined for the novel, and that I had known all my life. They would shoot the beach scene in a place where we had gone on holidays.’

Tóibín was impressed by the way Ronan inhabited the character of Eilis so completely. ‘She has an extraordinary facility to deal with suggestiveness, to suggest a great deal by doing very little. That’s a most fascinating idea, not only for people watching the film but for writers because that’s what you always try to do.

‘She has something, which is a mixture of being very, very vulnerable as an actress, pure vulnerability, pure innocence, but at the same time decisive.’

A. O. Scott in The New York Times said, ‘On the page, Eilis comes alive through the fineness of Mr Tóibín’s prose. A devotee of Henry James, he registers the fluctuations of the character’s inner weather with meteorological precision. Inwardness is a great challenge for filmmakers. The human face is a wall as well as a window. Words lose their power. Everything depends on the ability of actors to communicate nuances of feeling and fluctuations of consciousness.

‘And Ms Ronan uses everything — her posture, her eyebrows, her breath, her teeth, her pores — to convey a process of change that is both seismic and subtle.’