Sympathy

Alice Hare is a rootless young woman who arrives in New York City with no real plan and latches onto Mizuko Himuro, an older Japanese writer whose life she trails obsessively across Instagram, blogs, and search results. Convinced that the parallels between their histories make them soulmates and secret twins, Alice uses geotags and online research to orchestrate a "chance" encounter, then inserts herself into Mizuko's life through a tangle of half-truths. As real and online identities blur and three families across the globe collide, Sudjic builds a slippery, unreliable narrative about obsession, intimacy, and the selves we construct to avoid our own.