Signal Fires

Stunning in depth and breadth, this luminous examination of loss and acceptance, furtiveness and reliability, abandonment and friendship ultimately blazes with profound revelations ... Like creating an intricate origami puzzle, Shapiro folds together the events that define these lives over decades, focusing on specific interludes to divulge old secrets or bury new ones. Returning to fiction after touching readers with her courageous and probing memoirs, including Inheritance, Shapiro delivers keen perceptions about family dynamics via fictional characters that exude a rare combination of substance and delicacy.- Booklist (starred)

A beautiful exploration of the connections between two families and the reverberations from a teenager's lie ... Shapiro imagines in luminous prose how each of the characters' lives might have gone if things had turned out differently.- Publishers Weekly

[Shapiro's] well-developed characters and their interesting careers seal the deal. - Kirkus Reviews

Acclaimed novelist/memoirist Shapiro (Inheritance) writes with compassion and a deep understanding of the damage that secrets wreak. Shapiro's first novel in 15 years was well worth the wait.- Library Journal

Shapiro's first novel in 15 years tracks three generations on one suburban street through the prism of a drunk-driving accident that unearths several terrible secrets. The author's attention to craft is so detailed, so invisible, that 250 pages feel simultaneously taut and timeless, especially as a friendship between an elderly man and an adolescent boy allows many of the characters to attain something approaching closure.- Los Angeles Times

The celebrated memoirist returns to fiction with a lyrical and propulsive novel in which a horrific crash leaves a young woman dead and the driver's family closing ranks around him. The secrets and cover-ups that result will haunt the family for generations to come, but it's the richly drawn characters and moody atmospheric that make the book hard to put down.- Oprah Daily

Has everything she's been through - we've been through - spawned Shapiro's most spiritual work? In a construction as delicate as needlework but deceptively sturdy as one of Andy Goldsworthy's stone walls, Shapiro shows in fiction what she's spent decades teasing out in memoir: That our lives are ruled by subtle human connections we sometimes fail to understand because few of us are wholly plugged into the unseen forces that affect our lives.- Los Angeles Times