From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble comes a darkly exhilarating novel about an American family and its inheritance - the safety and wealth that they fought for, and the precarity of their survival that is their legacy. In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of the nicest part of Long Island. He is brutalised, held for ransom and then returned to his family. Miraculously, Carl, his wife and his three kids are left to move on with their lives, and resume their prized places in the ongoing saga of the American dream.
But nearly forty years later, when Carl's mother dies, the trauma that has been bubbling beneath the Fletchers' lives all this time surfaces at last. It becomes apparent that Carl has been quietly pursuing closure to the kidnapping for all these years, and his wife and children must face that the money that they believed bought them safety was actually never capable of doing any such thing.
Long Island Compromise spans generations, winding through decades of history all the way through to the wild present, dealing along the way with all the mainstays of American Jewish life and the timeless questions about wealth, trauma, and the American soul.
About the Author
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for
The New York Times Magazine. She has also written for
GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and many other publications.
Fleishman Is in Trouble, her first novel, was a
Sunday Times and
New York Times bestseller, and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. The TV adaptation from FX, written and executive produced by Taffy, was nominated for 7 Emmys.
Long Island Compromise is Taffy's second novel. She is currently adapting the book for an Apple TV production.
Industry Reviews
A lip-smacking tale of family, wealth and self-destruction told with relish - Guardian
An ambitious, funny family drama . . .
Lavishly comic - The Times
Elegant and devastating . . . A rich, stylish, moving and funny novel . . . Every reader will find something here that they can recognise, that will resonate and endure - Financial Times
Is this book as good [as Fleishman]? It's better. Sprawling yet nimble, this is her Big American Reform Jewish Novel . . . All those well-timed twists, neat callbacks and tidy scenes are a mitzvah for
this satisfying, touching novel. The talented Taffy Brodesser-Akner over here - The New York Times
Brodesser-Akner had me at "hello" with this opening line from her
raucous and ravishing Long Island Compromise, an epic family saga that joins the ranks of such great American novels as
The Corrections and
Middlesex . . . This author's talents are boundless . . . A humane, brazen, gorgeous novel whose words dance exuberantly on the page - Los Angeles Times
[A] scabrous satire of the super-rich . . . Brodesser-Akner is a keen observer of class aspiration as a survival method. - The New Yorker
The pleasure of Brodesser-Akner's writing is her ability to make us consider a weighty subject in a way that feels thrillingly original . . .
Greatness comes so often at the expense of what is enjoyable. Long Island Compromise is both, and then some - iPaper
Not gonna sugarcoat this:
Long Island Compromise is the best book I've read this year. You do not want to miss it
