Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Monday 28th October
Pilrig St. Paul's Church, 1B Pilrig St, Edinburgh EH6 5AH
7pm
7.30pm
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, 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. Come along for what promises to be an exciting evening and to find out more about Long Island Compromise, Brodesser-Akner's latest novel and, in the words of Elizabeth Gilbert, 'a work of utter perfection'.
Long Island Compromise
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 Taffy Brodesser-Akner
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. Long Island Compromise is her second novel.