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The Long Room

Audiobook
Fiction: Literary/ Women's Fiction
Unabridged   9.75 hour(s)
Publication date: 11/01/2016

The Long Room

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781681682662
Digital Download ISBN:9781681682679

Summary

Award-winning novelist Francesca Kay's new novel tells the story of a man who falls for the wrong woman.

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Product Description

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.

Reviews/Praise

"Healy’s beautifully modulated performance animates the twisty plot in this surprisingly moving exploration of a near-nonentity’s descent into self obliterating love." —Booklist Audio Review

"Engrossing . . . the grace of Kay’s voice is hypnotizing, and there are moments when her empathy for Stephen makes them seem barely divisible." —New York Times

"The Long Room is a striking and particularly satisfying work of espionage fiction." —Shelf Awareness

Author Bio

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.