Fic­tion

Small World

  • From the Publisher
September 1, 2021

From best­selling author Lau­ra Zig­man comes a heart­felt nov­el about two off­beat and new­ly divorced sis­ters who move in togeth­er as adults — and final­ly reck­on with their childhood

A year after her divorce, Joyce is set­tling into being sin­gle again. She likes her job archiv­ing fam­i­ly pho­tos and videos, and she’s devel­oped a secret com­fort­ing hob­by: trolling the neigh­bor­hood social net­work­ing site, Small World, for posts that help solve life’s eas­i­est prob­lems. When her old­er sis­ter, Lydia, also divorced, calls to tell her she’s mov­ing back east from Los Ange­les after almost thir­ty years away, Joyce invites Lydia to move into her Cam­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts apart­ment. Tem­porar­i­ly. Just until she finds a place of her own.

But their unlike­ly cohab­i­ta­tion — not helped by annoy­ing new neigh­bors upstairs — turns out to be the post-divorce rebound rela­tion­ship Joyce had­n’t planned on. Instead of forg­ing the bond she always dreamed of hav­ing with Lydia, their rela­tion­ship frays. And they rarely dis­cuss the loss of their sis­ter, Eleanor, who was sig­nif­i­cant­ly dis­abled and died when she was only ten years old. When new rev­e­la­tions from their fam­i­ly’s his­to­ry come to light, will those secrets fur­ther split them apart, or course cor­rect their con­nec­tion for the future?

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