Sympathy

At 23 Alice Hare leaves England for New York. She becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, a Japanese writer living in New York, whose life story has strange parallels to her own and whom she believes is her "Internet twin". What seems to Mizuko like a chance encounter with Alice is anything but - after all, in the age of connectivity, nothing is coincidence. Their subsequent relationship is doomed from the outset, exposing a tangle of lies and sexual encounters as three families across the globe collide, and the most ancient of questions - where do we come from? - is answered just by searching online.

In its heady evocation of everything from Haruki Murakami to Patricia Highsmith to Edith Wharton, Sympathy is utterly original - a thrilling tale of obsession, doubling, blood ties and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age.

Genre: General Fiction