On a summer evening in the 1990s, Anne learns that one of her husband鈥檚 lovers is expecting his child, only a few weeks after learning that she too is pregnant. He tells her casually, as if it鈥檚 just another colorful story about his day. And the tenuous understanding between them鈥攖he careful balance of privacy and flexibility that has sustained their open marriage to date鈥攊s shattered.
Meanwhile, Sandy, the lover, works to find her own path forward through her surprise pregnancy and all the million tiny miracles and catastrophes that she must now navigate, often entirely on her own. Searching through diaries and grocery lists and seances with the dead, Sandy tries to remember just enough of her original sense of direction to make her own way home.
鈥凌别补诲颈苍驳 Likeness, I couldn鈥檛 help marveling at how well Samsun Knight knows Anne, Sebastian, and Sandy, and how deftly he delineates their many changes of heart. He has an exquisite gift for capturing those moments when a character reaches the edge of their known feelings and steps into terra incognita. The result is a wonderfully suspenseful and deeply pleasurable novel.鈥濃擬argot Livesey, author, The Flight of Gemma Hardy
鈥淒avid Foster Wallace said his tastes in reading turned toward the realistic because most experimental stuff was hellaciously unfun to read. The genius of Likeness is to pair experiment with realism, asking really fun questions of old forms, delivering both the story of love and a slant and sly look at how we tell those stories. The power-to-weight ratio here is perfect. Everything鈥檚 up for negotiation: monogamy, fidelity, marriage, babies. How do we come to know each other, how do we gather and bind, how do we deepen and endure and go on, what arrangements are we making for love? It鈥檚 said that happy love has no history, but Likeness, in its brief and brilliant moment, is a joy to read, and that鈥檚 plenty.鈥濃擟harles D鈥橝mbrosio, author, The Dead Fish Museum
鈥Likeness is a beautifully rendered short novel full of twisting, complexly twined threads, a fascinating tangle of family connections that explores the parts of ourselves we inherit from our kin鈥攁nd the parts of ourselves we invent. Knight is a remarkable writer.鈥濃擠an Chaon, author, Sleepwalk
鈥Likeness is propulsive, hilarious, moving, and profound. It鈥檚 also a page-turner about a love triangle and the challenges of finding a stable, if unconventional, relationship. Even more than that, it鈥檚 about how hard it is to articulate what we really want from love, parenthood, or even life in general.鈥濃擬aria Kuznetsova, author, Something Unbelievable
鈥淜night rearranges and refracts what we thought we knew of the domestic drama and gives it new shape. Likeness shimmers like a house of mirrors with its continuously distorting understandings of what love is supposed to be. Tender, infuriating, redeeming, and graceful. I devoured it.鈥濃擡skor David Johnson, author, Pay as You Go
