The Booker Prize-shortlisted, exhilarating novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love**LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026****SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2025**AGUARDIAN,INDEPENDENT and NEW STATESMAN Book of the Year'Slick, sharp, strange and singular . . . You’ll gulp this novel down in one in-breath'SAMANTHA HARVEY, Booker Prize-winning author ofOrbital'A lightning bolt of a novel'FINANCIAL TIMES'I’m not sure there’s anyone better writing in America today'ALEX PRESTON,ObserverOne woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we loveTwo people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting o