Description
‘Is this book as good [as Fleishman]? It’s better’ THE NEW YORK TIMES
‘The best book I’ve read this year’ HARLAN COBEN
‘Very, very good’ ELIZABETH DAY
‘This book is DYNAMITE. Inhaled it in two sittings’ CAITLIN MORAN
‘Shocking, tender, profound and delicious’ EMILY MAITLIS
‘Lavishly comic’ THE TIMES
‘[A] scabrous satire of the super-rich’ THE NEW YORKER
‘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
‘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
