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    The Long Room
    The Long Room
    The Long Room
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Long Room

    Written by Francesca Kay

    Narrated by Michael Healy

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateNov 1, 2016
    ISBN9781681682679
    The Long Room
    Author

    Francesca Kay

    Francesca Kay’s first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2009. She lives in Oxford with her family.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Sad tale of a British intelligence officer deluded into believing he's in love with the subject of his surveillance and what happens when someone with dark motives takes advantage of his fantasy life.Stephen is a "listener" who is tasked with surveillance on a suspected double agent who becomes enamored of the subject's wife Helen. Single and the only child of a lonely aging mother, Stephen leads an isolated life and his imaginary relationship with Helen distracts him from some very real manipulations right under his nose. What happens next is just sad. But the book is a slow burn and a satisfying read.