Showing results by author "Helen Schulman" in All Categories

On a sultry summer night in Paris, two women meet in line at an ice cream kiosk on the Ile de la Cité. One is tall, fair, striking, with an indeterminate accent. The other, a troubled American TV star, is hiding her beauty and identity under a shapeless sweatshirt, wearing sunglasses even in the darkness.

Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s 19-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny's play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses" - all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously - to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives. Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. Even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken.

When the Bergamots move to a well-to-do neighbourhood, they're unsure how well they'll adapt. Soon though, Richard is consumed by his new role and Liz is hectically playing mother to 4-year-old Coco and 15 year-old Jake. But the day Jake unthinkingly forwards his friends a sexually-explicit email from a young girl is the last day of the Bergamots' comfortable existence. Faced with impossible choices, what Richard and Liz do next risks destroying not only their marriage, their daughter, and their place in the community, but also Jake - the child they have set out to protect.