FICTION Long Island Compromise Taffy Brodesser-Akner Wildfire, $32.99 “Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” So begins Long Island Compromise, a sprawling, generation-spanning novel that starts with a family tragedy, then blooms across the decades following. The Fletchers are the family in question: a wealthy Jewish-American bunch whose patriarch, Styrofoam factory owner Carl, is kidnapped from his driveway one morning in 1980, then brutalised and held for ransom.
When he is safely returned, the family sweeps it under the rug and pretends it didn’t happen – but of course, intergenerational trauma doesn’t quite work that way. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s second novel has plenty to say about wealth, family and community, some of it astute. Credit: AP Literary fiction readers will be familiar with Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s observational prose, zippy dialogue and acerbic, dark sense of humour.
The author’s first novel, Fleishman is in Trouble , dissected a crumbling marriage from three very different perspectives. It was one of the most buzzy fiction debuts of 2019, and was later made into a television show, also written and executive produced by the author ( Long Island Compromise will be adapted for screen by Apple TV). Fleishman , and Brodesser-Akner’s celebrity profiles for The New York Times (the one on Gwyneth Paltrow is a hoot), cemented her as a clear-eyed writer with quick, wicked wit and sharp insights into all the shades of what makes us human.