Long Island Compromise

From the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble comes Long Island Compromise, a darkly exhilarating novel about an American Jewish family and its inheritance - the safety and wealth that they fought for, and the trauma, the fear, and the precariousness of their survival that is their legacy.

In 1982, wealthy businessman 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, a week later, returned to his family. Carl, his wife and his kids all try to move on with their lives and resume their prized places in the ongoing saga of the American dream.

But nearly 40 years later, when Carl's mother dies, the trauma that has been bubbling beneath the Fletchers' lives all this time finally surfaces for the entire family: Carl, the still-terrified father, desperately seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping, but too trapped in the mire of his trauma to ask for it; his wife, Ruth, who has spent her potential protecting Carl's emotional health to the detriment of her children's; and their three grown children: Nathan, a walking panic attack trying to get promoted at his law firm; Beamer, a Hollywood producer numbing his perpetual terror with food, drugs and women; and Jenny, the wanderer, who has spent her life so bent on proving she is not a product of the family's pathology that she comes to define it.

Once Carl's mother is gone, he finally allows himself to acknowledge what happened to him all those years ago, and face the question that's been idling in his mind for a quarter of a century: where did the ransom go? And if he were ever to find the money, would it finally give him and his family the relief and comfort they've so needed all these years?

Long Island Compromise spans decades of history, winding through generations all the way through the wild present and deals, along the way, with all the mainstays of American Jewish