Jenna Johnson, my keen editor: all of our conversations are thought-provoking, and I’m very grateful for your brilliant work. Heartfelt thanks to Lydia Zoells, Brian Gittis, and everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where I am so fortunate to have landed with St. Ivo.

And, of course, I’m beyond grateful for my family—chaos, music, and boundless love.

Also by Joanna Hershon

ALSO BY JOANNA HERSHON

Swimming

The Outside of August

The German Bride

A Dual Inheritance

Praise for St. Ivo

PRAISE FOR ST. IVO

“Wonderful … This is such an amazing New York novel … Tak[es] our romanticized ideas about spaces and places and completely turn[s] them upside-down … I read this book in a single sitting … It was so gripping.”

—Susan Choi, author of Trust Exercise, at Books Are Magic

“Hershon maintains a quiet terror throughout this slim, eccentric novel. Though it moves at a harrowing pace, this is not a traditional thriller … The friction resides, innovatively, in the agony of interpersonal misunderstandings, the awkwardness of old friends—now strangers—trapped together for a period of days … [It’s] fiction full of complexity, devoted to reality. And in the end, a larger sense of purpose crashes down in a satisfying burst.”

—Danya Kukafka, The New York Times Book Review

“St. Ivo is a wise and revealing book, full of elegant menace—a novel whose tensions threaten to break its surface on every page. But Hershon is a master of control, showing us patiently, and with rich verisimilitude, how a parent’s love for an estranged child persists despite separation and silence; how longtime friendships hurt and heal; and how loss compels us to know ourselves, much as we might wish to look away.”

—Julie Orringer, author of The Flight Portfolio

“Hershon explores with moving simplicity the complexities of friendships and a marriage that has frayed but not yet died.”

—Publishers Weekly

“With a building sense of foreboding and suspense, Hershon traces the emotions of Sarah, a feature filmmaker and mother … Parents will shiver at Hershon’s moving story of fierce but helpless parental love.”

—Mary Ellen Prindiville, Booklist

“Joanna Hershon’s descriptive powers are vivid and cinematic, but she’s also an expert chronicler of the invisible: the changing emotional weather of a marriage, the vicissitudes of sexual passion and of grief, and the way that two human beings in an intimate relationship can still keep devastating secrets from each other. About a particular time and place—Brooklyn, right now—St. Ivo has the eerie quality of a fairy tale, as if something inexplicable might be waiting around the next bend in even the most familiar path.”

—Nell Freudenberger, author of Lost and Wanted

“An elegant, suspenseful gem of a novel. I admired the crisp writing and intelligent depictions of people, but more than that I needed to know what was going to happen next—I devoured it in a weekend.”

—Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.