“Riveting and deeply felt and true.”
— Dave Eggers
Don’t I Know You?
“It succeeds brilliantly — like Shepard’s previous novels, An Empire of Women and The Bad Boy’s Wife — as a deft study of the mechanics of compromise. The perversely lopsided sway of power is evident in the relationships of teacher and student, rich fiancé and materialistic bride-to-be, dying widow and only child. Their different facets emerge as slowly and steadily as the details in an old Polaroid: first the quotidian foreground comes into focus, then an ominous backdrop shadows the picture with anxiety.”
— The New York Times Book Review
In 1976 in New York City, Gina Engel was murdered in her front hall. The police believed the victim had known her attacker. But they had few suspects, and as time went on, the case remained unsolved. Yet the suspicions of those who knew Gina both intimately and from a distance continue to plague them.
Gina’s son, Steven, discovered the body and caught only a fleeting glimpse of the killer as he fled. If only, he wonders again and again. As Lily Chin prepares for her upcoming wedding, her life is irrevocably changed when a mysterious woman appears to inform her of her fiancé’s secret life—a life that may have included Gina Engel. And more than a decade later, Louise Carpanetti, the woman who received a call from the dying Gina, finally acknowledges that her own emotionally disturbed son may have committed the gruesome murder. As long as the murderer’s identity remains a mystery, all three must forever call into question the nature of the people closest to them.
Don’t I know You? is an intricate and devastating psychological drama told in three separate but interconnected narratives. Together, those narratives unfold into a mystery that absorbs and thrills, and lay out an examination of the human heart that is quietly dazzling in its emotional intelligence and elegant understatement. Shepard’s vision of how a murder’s effect reverberates outward inspires us to understand the limitations of intimate knowledge and the extraordinary capacities of the people we think we know best, even as it shows us how we repair those bonds and prepare ourselves to go on.