{"product_id":"the-long-room-isbn-9781941040454","title":"The Long Room","description":"\u003cb\u003eAward-winning novelist Francesca Kay's new novel tells the story of a\nman who falls for the wrong woman.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eLondon. December 1981. The IRA is on the attack, a cold war is being waged, another war is just over the horizon, and Stephen Donaldson spends his days listening. When he first joined the Institute, he expected to encounter glamorous, high-risk espionage. Instead he gets the tape-recorded conversations of ancient Communists and ineffectual revolutionaries--until the day he is assigned a new case: the ultra-secret PHOENIX, a suspected internal leak. The monotony of Stephen’s routine is broken, but it’s not PHOENIX who captures his imagination; it’s the target’s wife, Helen. Beset by isolation and loneliness, Stephen becomes dangerously obsessed with Helen, risking his job to keep his fragile connection to her and inadvertently setting himself up for a fall that will forever change his life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e  With compassion and tenderness and moments of unexpected humor, Francesca Kay charts the way in which imagination, projection, and desire overwhelm the paucity of Stephen’s life and identity. As beautiful as it is intense, \u003ci\u003eThe Long Room\u003c\/i\u003e explores a mind under pressure and the wilder cravings of the heart. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cb\u003eEvoking the work of Ian McEwan and John LeCarré, but in its own clear voice\u003c\/b\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Long Room\u003c\/i\u003e is a gripping, sensitive page-turner, with a terrible absence at its heart.\n—Sean Michaels, author of US CONDUCTORS\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIts language is \u003cb\u003ebrilliant, a poet's language, luminous and watchful\u003c\/b\u003e . . . [T]he grace of Kay's voice is hypnotizing, and there are moments when her empathy for Stephen makes them seem barely divisible.\n—The New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere is le Carré writ small yet still tense . . . \u003cb\u003eKay is consistently entertaining in this subtle, sad psychological thriller\u003c\/b\u003e. \n—Kirkus, Starred Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA brilliant spy novel\u003c\/b\u003e charged with existential dread.\n—Publishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMany spy novels have complicated protagonists, but Stephen is unique in his fragility, desire, and solipsism, making this a study of pathology born of loneliness. Kay...winds it all up tightly, building to \u003cb\u003ea remarkably suspenseful conclusion\u003c\/b\u003e.\n—Booklist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOrnate sentences unfurl with poetry and emotional weight . . . In this time of confusion—existential dreading, even—\u003cb\u003ea book like this one grabs at our deepest fears and offers them up for examination.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Long Room\u003c\/i\u003e is therefore more than an engaging read—it’s a compassionate reminder that we’re all at least partially blind to our most damaging fixations.\n—The Dallas Morning News\u003cb\u003eFrancesca Kay\u003c\/b\u003e's first novel, \u003ci\u003eAn Equal Stillness\u003c\/i\u003e, won the Orange Award for New Writers. Her second novel, \u003ci\u003eTranslation of the Bones\u003c\/i\u003e, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Kay lives in Oxford, England.","brand":"Tin House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233703440613,"sku":"NP9781941040454","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781941040454.jpg?v=1767740304","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-long-room-isbn-9781941040454","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}