Long Island Compromise
A sensational new novel by the international bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble
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3.9 • 18 Ratings
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
'Is this book as good [as Fleishman]? It's better' THE NEW YORK TIMES
'Might be a masterpiece' HUGH LAURIE
'The best book I've read this year' HARLAN COBEN
'Very, very good' ELIZABETH DAY
'The book of the summer, nay, the year' DAVID SEDARIS
'This book is DYNAMITE. Inhaled it in two sittings' CAITLIN MORAN
'Shocking, tender, profound and delicious' EMILY MAITLIS
'Lavishly comic' THE TIMES
'A lip-smacking tale' GUARDIAN
'Elegant and devastating' FINANCIAL TIMES
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.
MORE PRAISE FOR LONG ISLAND COMPROMISE:
'The status book you'll want to be seen with' STYLIST
'[A] scabrous satire' THE NEW YORKER
'This author's talents are boundless' LA TIMES
'Substantive and profound' CATHY RENTZENBRINK
'Greatness so often comes at the expense of what is enjoyable. Long Island Compromise is both, and then some' IPAPER
'Exuberant and absorbing' ATLANTIC
PRAISE FOR FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE:
'There is no one that this book isn't for . . . Pure brilliance' INDIA KNIGHT, THE SUNDAY TIMES
'Could be one of the books of my entire lifetime. I've never felt so seen' GRACE DENT, GUARDIAN
'Sharp and wicked, insightful and funny, and then suddenly so touching' DAVID NICHOLLS
'A work of utter perfection' ELIZABETH GILBERT
[FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE was a Sunday Times bestseller (UK) in August 2019 and a New York Times bestseller (USA) in June 2019]
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this barbed, deep-diving satire, dysfunction is practically emblazoned on a wealthy family’s coat of arms. The Fletchers are a Long Island Jewish family living the early-1980s version of the good life when patriarch Carl is kidnapped but released unharmed a week later. Physically, anyway—the psychological fallout of the kidnapping ricochets for decades. In her follow-up to Fleishman Is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner jumps between decades to follow the Fletchers as they grapple uneasily with daily life. She moves like an acrobat between soulful sadness and scathing wit, dropping in delicious set pieces like a lavish bar mitzvah with a basketball theme and hilariously quotable lines like “My trainer says hydration is a myth.” There’s scarcely a scrap of modern American culture Long Island Compromise doesn’t touch. And when you can’t decide whether to laugh or cry, you may end up doing both.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brodesser-Akner (Fleishman Is in Trouble) easily avoids the sophomore slump with another incisive and witty portrait of New York Jewish life. In 1980, wealthy polystyrene manufacturer Carl Fletcher was kidnapped from his Long Island home and held for a week until his wife, Ruth, paid the $250,000 ransom. Now, 40 years later, he's still traumatized, and is dutifully tended to by the controlling but loyal Ruth. Their three children also continue to live under the shadow of the kidnapping. There's Beamer, a moderately successful screenwriter with a secret drug and BDSM addiction; Nathan, a lawyer who's too timid for the partner track at his firm; and Jenny, a union organizer whose chief pleasure in life is pissing off her mother. Beamer is excited about an idea for a new project starring Mandy Patinkin when Jenny texts with troubling news: due to a series of financial reversals, the family fortune they've all depended on is gone. How the Fletchers respond to the crisis and finally put their shared past to rest forms the core of this entertaining saga. Brodesser-Akner's latest combines the smarts of Sarah Silverman's stand-up, the polymath verisimilitude of Tom Wolfe's novels, and the Jewish soul of Sholem Aleichem's stories. This is a comedic feast.
