‘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
‘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, brutalised and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife, kids and exquisite Long Island home less than a week later, and the family moves on with their gilded lives.
But now, nearly forty years later, it seems that nobody ever got over anything, after all. With a death in the family, the hidden struggles of the Fletchers come bubbling to the surface.
Carl has spent years secretly seeking closure to the mystery of his kidnapping, while his wife, Ruth, has given up everything to protect her husband’s fragile emotional health and keep the business thriving. Their three grown children aren’t doing much better: Nathan’s chronic existential fear won’t allow him to advance at his law fi rm; Beamer, a failing Hollywood screenwriter, will consume anything - substances, food, women - at any cost; and Jenny, with her brilliant mind, is desperate to prove she is not anything like her family by working in trade unions (whilst still receiving quarterly payouts from the family business).
Money was what put the Fletchers in danger, but it has also protected them - until now…
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.