On a summer evening in the 1990s, Anne learns that one of her husband’s lovers is expecting, not long after learning that she too is pregnant. He tells her casually in a fairy tale like way, as if it’s just another colorful story about his day. And the tenuous understanding between them—the careful balance of privacy and flexibility that has sustained their open relationship to date—is 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 now has to 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.
“Reading Likeness, I couldn’t 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.”—Margot Livesey, author, The Flight of Gemma Hardy
“David 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’s 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’s said that happy love has no history, but Likeness, in its brief and brilliant moment, is a joy to read, and that’s plenty.”—Charles D’Ambrosio, author, The Dead Fish Museum
“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—and the parts of ourselves we invent. Knight is a remarkable writer.”—Dan Chaon, author, Sleepwalk
“Likeness is both a hilarious wild ride about a love triangle and a serious investigation into what makes us love, procreate, and live with purpose. What’s more—it’s nearly impossible not to finish it in one sitting.”—Maria Kuznetsova, author, Something Unbelievable
“Likeness is propulsive, hilarious, moving, and profound. It’s also a page-turner about a love triangle and the challenges of finding a stable, if unconventional, relationship. Even more than that, it’s about how hard it is to articulate what we really want from love, parenthood, or even life in general.”—Maria Kuznetsova, author, Something Unbelievable
“Knight 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.”—Eskor David Johnson, author, Pay as You Go
