What To Read

Lying on the beach, whiling the afternoon away with a book. This glorious activity may seem like a distant dream as we recover from winter, but summer reading is around the corner. The question is: which books will be on every avid reader's beach radar this year? We're putting money on Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose previous novel Fleishman Is in Trouble was the literary summer jam of 2019, followed by a wildly popular TV adaptation that became one of the most talked-about shows of last year.

We've selected Long Island Compromise as one of five notable books coming out next season that will be featured in our First Dibs Editors Salon, taking place virtually on May 1 at 7pm ET. Learn more and RSVP.

We are honored to have the book's acquiring editor, Andy Ward (Executive Vice President and Publisher, Random House), join us at the salon. He shared this personal note about the book as a special preview just for Tertulia readers.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (July 9)

Here’s everything I knew about Long Island Compromise when Taffy Brodesser-Akner first told me about it, back in 2018: It would be a novel loosely inspired by a kidnapping that actually occurred in the town where she grew up in Long Island in the 1980s. (She told me this, by the way, long before her first novel, Fleishman is in Trouble, was published. I’ve never known anyone whose brain was as full of ideas as Taffy; if you ask her today, she’ll tell you what her next three books will be.)

Six years and many, many drafts later, Taffy delivered a book that, yes, begins with the kidnapping of a wealthy businessman in the crescent-shaped driveway of his sprawling home on Long Island, but then… isn’t really about the kidnapping at all. It’s about inheritance – of wealth and trauma – and the saga of the American Dream. Taffy had taken that germ of an idea and built a whole world around it, opening it up in ways I never anticipated, creating a deep, hilarious, and unforgettable portrait of a family in slow-motion crisis, one that – okay, I’m going to say it – reminds me of the best of Roth and Franzen.

– Andy Ward, Executive Vice President and Publisher at Random House