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by Francesca Kay
Award-winning novelist Francesca Kay's new novel tells the story of a man who falls for the wrong woman.
London. 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.
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, The Long Room explores a mind under pressure and the wilder cravings of the heart.
"Starred Review. Kay is consistently entertaining in this subtle, sad psychological thriller." - Kirkus
"Filled with witty period references to Brideshead Revisited, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Another Country, this is a haunting work of espionage fiction." - Publishers Weekly
"Many spy novels have complicated protagonists, but Stephen isunique in his fragility, desire, and solipsism, making this a study of pathology born of loneliness. Kay...winds it all up tightly, building to a remarkably suspenseful conclusion." - Booklist
"Perhaps it's the time period, possibly it's Kay's elegant classicism, but The Long Room seems like the sort of novel that might have won the Booker around 1981. It says much about the author's acute sensitivity to the minutiae of human behaviour that it wouldn't look out of place in 2016." - James Kidd, The Independent (UK)
"Evoking the work of Ian McEwan and John LeCarré, but in its own clear voice, The Long Room is a gripping, sensitive page-turner, with a terrible absence at its heart." - Sean Michaels, author of Us Conductors
This information about The Long Room was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Francesca Kay's first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the Orange Award for New Writers. Her second novel, Translation of the Bones, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Kay lives in Oxford, England.
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