In 1980, a wealthy successful businessman, a factory owner, Carl Fletcher, living with his wife Ruth and their two sons, Nathan and Bernard, on their big estate on Long Island, is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of the nicest part of Long Island. He is brutalise, 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 Flethchers’ 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 ending any such thing.

On a spring day in 1980, Carl heads out of the door, climbs into his Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham – Taffy Brodesser-Akner is brilliant on the material details of the Flethchers’ lives, two boys are eating the now discounted product 19 cereal as their father leaves the house- and is kidnapped as is held for ransom. When Carl is eventually found, the Fletchers determine to put this ordeal behind them. At Long Island Jewish hospital, where Carl is taken to begin his recovery, his mother Phyllis sees her grown son  begin to weep, and will have none of it. “Listen to me, boy chic,” she tells him. “ This happened to your body, This didn’t happen to you. Don’t let it in”.

Long Island spans generations with all the mainstays of American Jewish life and the timeless questions about wealth, trauma, and the American soul.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Wildfire £20, 446 pages.