Delphinium Books

WHEN 45-YEAR-OLD MARI SARKISIAN WYATT, A FREELANCE COPY EDITOR, DECIDED TO HAVE A THIRD CHILD, SHE HAD NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS GETTING INTO, EXCEPT THAT A WOMAN HER AGE HAD A SUCCESS RATE OF LESS THAN 5% WITHOUT HELP. 

MARI wanted to take advantage of her state’s insurance mandate requiring HMO plans offered by large companies to cover infertility treatments (including three cycles of in vitro fertilization). With an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a master’s degree from Stanford, she worked for two years as a grocery bagger for a large supermarket chain in order to receive this coverage. Meanwhile, she interviewed dozens of younger, sometimes desperate women who were willing to sell their eggs in order to their rent. Pregnant at last, she endured months, then years, of ill effects, risking her health and even her life. Along the way, she met other couples who had suffered even worse setbacks and unimaginable tragedies. 

MARI SARKISIAN WYATT is a pseudonym for an Armenian-American who received her B.A. from Princeton and her M.A. from Stanford, both in English. After being deemed unemployable by multiple job agencies in her Midwestern hometown, she moved to New York City, where she worked in publishing for over a decade. Deciding that it would be too difficult to raise a family in Manhattan, she and her husband, Wesley, moved back to the Midwest, and she became a freelance copy editor to work from home, not imagining that her first child would be diagnosed with autism, which at the time, the early 1990s, was rare and considered untreatable. She and Wesley spent the first six years of their son’s life inventing therapies for him, then despite being in her forties, Mari decided that he needed a brother to teach him how to be a guy. What began as a nice idea—to have a child using assisted reproductive technology—quickly turned into an all-consuming obsession, and she spent six more years trying to fulfill that goal. Writing under a different name, Mari is the author of four romances and the co-author (with her now adult son) of two self-help guides for the parents of special-needs children.

A complex family drama with a Manhattan family court judge at its center.

 I Don’t Know How to Tell You This focuses on Judge Rachel Sugarman and her life both inside and outside the courtroom. Rachel is part of a close Jewish family whose lives are marked by significant emotional challenges, including the painful recognition that her beloved husband is slowly being diminished by memory loss, and the past trauma of her mother-in-law, a prickly Holocaust survivor who, in old age, continues to struggle with her grief. 

Rachel’s career as a judge and the power she wields in her courtroom offer an intimate look at a woman navigating what is still, in the 21st century, a profession most often dominated by men. The novel explores the very topical issues of child and spousal abuse, which color the dark undercurrent of the courtroom scenes. And though it reflects serious issues, there is very clearly a pitch-black comic sensibility at work throughout the novel.  By turns sad and touching and quirkily humorous, I Don’t Know How To Tell You This is vintage Marian Thurm.  

Brooklyn’s Hasidic community of Lubavitchers is turned upside down when family tragedy strikes and everyday life changes forever in the life of Zev Altshul.

He is first placed into the care of the closed and close-knit community where he grew up, but soon realizes he can’t stay. His saving grace is handball; it’s his gift from God, and the one thing he can rely on as he is shuttled, chased, and abandoned by trusted elders, family, and friends. Even as Zev never fully escapes from the guilt of his choices, he sets course across the United States to discover where loyalty really lies and what it means.

He seeks out his long-lost sister, only to find himself as unprepared for life outside the Lubavitcher community as he was unwilling to remain. Forced out of his second home, Zev plays handball to support himself in the goyische world, but obligations he doesn’t fully understand still tie him to Crown Heights and follow him to Chicago and New Mexico threatening always to return Zev to life among the Lubavitchers.

Lyrical, vivid, and thoroughly engaging, this is certainly among the first novels of its kind.

Newman’s trio of novellas about desert misfits are by turns probing, incandescent, and like her shorter fiction, riotously funny and are certain to broaden her readership.

Inspired by the true story of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and his studies at the University of Michigan, The Professor of Immortality is a gripping, heartfelt look at the way we might or might not choose to respond to recent advances in science and technology, that, despite their positive impact, also threaten to destroy our environment, our privacy, our ability to connect with nature, and our sense of life’s authentic meaning and purpose.

Newman’s trio of novellas about desert misfits are by turns probing, incandescent, and like her shorter fiction, riotously funny and are certain to broaden her readership.

Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute of Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. But when her beloved husband dies, she is so devastated she can barely get out of bed. To make matters worse, her son, Zach, has abruptly quit his job in Silicon Valley and been out of contact for seven months. Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student (and a former close friend of her son) might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that Zach might either be involved in or become a victim of this extremist’s bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine feels compelled to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him, even as she knows she should report her suspicions to the FBI to prevent greater carnage.

Inspired by the true story of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and his studies at the University of Michigan, The Professor of Immortality is a gripping, heartfelt look at the way we might or might not choose to respond to recent advances in science and technology, that, despite their positive impact, also threaten to destroy our environment, our privacy, our ability to connect with nature, and our sense of life’s authentic meaning and purpose.

Brooklyn’s Hasidic community of Lubavitchers is turned upside down when family tragedy strikes and everyday life changes forever in the life of Zev Altshul.

He is first placed into the care of the closed and close-knit community where he grew up, but soon realizes he can’t stay. His saving grace is handball; it’s his gift from God, and the one thing he can rely on as he is shuttled, chased, and abandoned by trusted elders, family, and friends. Even as Zev never fully escapes from the guilt of his choices, he sets course across the United States to discover where loyalty really lies and what it means.

He seeks out his long-lost sister, only to find himself as unprepared for life outside the Lubavitcher community as he was unwilling to remain. Forced out of his second home, Zev plays handball to support himself in the goyische world, but obligations he doesn’t fully understand still tie him to Crown Heights and follow him to Chicago and New Mexico threatening always to return Zev to life among the Lubavitchers.

Lyrical, vivid, and thoroughly engaging, this is certainly among the first novels of its kind.

Set in the vanished world of the New York City of the 1970s and ‘80s, these stories convey a sense of the enchantment that lurks on the flip side of every moment, as if the meaning of life were hidden within the static being blasted out of the loudspeakers on a subway platform, or a scrap of newspaper preserved under ice on a cold winter’s day.

A girl tries to save the boy she loves from his crippling love for his uncle.  A champion of social justice talks herself into believing that the man she finds sexually repulsive is a perfect fit for her perfectly ordered life. A man kneels on the sidewalk before a memorial he constructed for his girlfriend as a crowd of curious onlookers gather around him. Rosaler deals out the fates of a vivid array of complex characters with unflagging energy, wit and a delight in the details of city life.  

Recently released from prison, reclusive Blake Alvares returns to the only place she ever felt safe, the now derelict Maine town in which she harbored as a teen. Determined to conceal her secrets and losses, she soon finds herself dragged into others’ lives when she rents a room from an ailing widow and takes a job on a boat owned by a notorious young lobsterman named Leland.

Leland Savard is nearly broke, trying to support himself and 9-year-old Quinnie as he wrestles with a dangerous family legacy. Despite all odds, he and Blake forge a successful working partnership, and as she establishes a timid friendship with widowed Nora, Blake glimpses what it might mean to truly belong. But when Leland's rash actions place her and Quinnie in peril, Blake feels forced to run again. On her quest for home, she must confront a daunting question: can she ever again trust in human connection?

- Winner: 2025 IPPY Silver Medal 

- Honorable Mention: Eric Hoffer Book Award

- Finalist: Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award

- Finalist: Next Generation Indie Book Award

- Finalist: National Indie Excellence Award

A complex family drama with a Manhattan family court judge at its center. 

I Don’t Know How to Tell You This focuses on Judge Rachel Sugarman and her life both inside and outside the courtroom. Rachel is part of a close Jewish family whose lives are marked by significant emotional challenges, including the painful recognition that her beloved husband is slowly being diminished by memory loss, and the past trauma of her mother-in-law, a prickly Holocaust survivor who, in old age, continues to struggle with her grief.

Rachel’s career as a judge and the power she wields in her courtroom offer an intimate look at a woman navigating what is still, in the 21st century, a profession most often dominated by men. The novel explores the very topical issues of child and spousal abuse, which color the dark undercurrent of the courtroom scenes. And though it reflects serious issues, there is very clearly a pitch-black comic sensibility at work throughout the novel.  Equally sad and touching and quirkily humorous, I Don’t Know How To Tell You This is quintessential Marian Thurm. 

Oriana Fallaci was born a rebel. She fought beside her father at age fourteen in Italy’s Resistance against the Nazis and overcame poverty, the lack of a university education, and relentless sexism in the newsroom. By 1973 when she moved to New York, Oriana Fallaci was hailed by Newsweek as the greatest interviewer of her day. She became famous for her courageous and hard-hitting interviews with Kissinger, Arafat, Meir, Khomeini and other world leaders—not to mention the most prominent celebrities and artists of her day.

That same year, 1973, she did what no journalist is supposed to do: she fell in love with one of her subjects, Alexander Panagoulis, the Greek poet and hero. She was 44, he was 34; they lived in different countries. It didn’t matter. Oriana had finally found what she longed for: a full life. But can a woman ever have it all, or does life always exact a price?

Oriana is the first novel about the glamorous and fearless Italian journalist whom Christiane Amanpour has called her role model for asking tough questions—and who holds a place beside Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters when naming world-class interviewers. This biographical novel tells the story of one of the first women to break through the glass ceiling of journalism, a woman who wasn’t afraid to speak truth to power and who revolutionized her field, all while trying to balance her career with love and happiness.

For readers who loved Hidden Figures and stories about women who succeed as women in realms traditionally reserved for men.

In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and disease have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technology to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible. Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment.

This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan’s most talented writers is a modern-day parable, The Handmaid’s Tale about women’s lives in repressive Muslim countries everywhere. It takes the patriarchal practices of female seclusion and veiling, gender selection, and control over women’s bodies, amplifies and distorts them in a truly terrifying way to imagine a world of post-religious authoritarianism.

Award-winning author Maxine Rosaler brings wit, heart, and striking originality to literary fiction, offering a poignant exploration of city life and human connection in this timeless short story collection

Set against the vibrant and gritty backdrop of 1970s and 1980s New York City, The Missing Kidney and Other Stories brings to life a kaleidoscope of human experiences with humor, heartbreak, and humanity on every page. This engrossing collection of short stories captures the enchantment in the mundane, exploring how meaning can unexpectedly emerge from everyday moments.

From a girl’s desperate attempt to save the boy she loves from his fixation on his uncle, to a social justice champion rationalizing an imperfect partnership, to a man kneeling by a memorial for his lost love on the busy city sidewalks, Rosaler’s stories spotlight the tangled beauty of human connection and the hidden magic in life’s imperfections.

In this true love letter to NYC, the city’s streets, sounds, and characters come alive, capturing the nostalgic charm of life before the digital age. With sharp, original prose, Rosaler turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, dealing out the fates of a vivid array of complex individuals with unflagging energy, wit and a delight in the details of city life–leaving readers engrossed, reflective, deeply moved, and reminded of what it truly means to be human.

When a Hollywood producer comes to Oriana at the end of her life to propose a movie, the story unfolds of her gutsy career rise as a journalist, her tragic love, and her greatest regret.

When a Hollywood producer visits Oriana Fallaci at the end of her life to propose a movie, the story unfolds of her trailblazing career as a journalist, her tragic love, and her greatest regret.

Oriana was born in Italy, moved to Manhattan, and shot to international fame for her provocative interviews of world leaders and celebrities. At her peak in 1973, Oriana was called “the best reporter in the world.” That’s when she fell in love with Alexander Panagoulis, Greek hero and poet. He was ten years younger and lived in a different country, but Oriana didn’t care. She had finally found what she longed for: a full life. Can a woman ever have it all, or does life always exact a price?

Christiane Amanpour calls Oriana her role model, saying, “I wanted to be her!”

Oriana holds a place alongside Mike Wallace and Barbara Walters as a legendary interviewer. But her story is little-known in America, until now.

The first biographical novel of the glamorous Italian, the iconic journalist, the woman in love. 

A stylish satire set in pandemic New York City that pokes at capitalism, creativity, loneliness and love all against the background of a frantic modern moment. 

Maya is a young freelancer helping to stage ultra-luxury apartments in Manhattan. She’s mastered having a great attitude despite being kind of a mess. She’s good at her job but what she really wants is to be an artist, even if, let’s admit it, her art is making puppets - not that there’s anything wrong with that.

When the Covid lockdown hits, Maya flees her crummy flat in Queens and stows away in a conveniently vacant, brand new super-high rise penthouse, the kind built for oligarchs and billionaires. From her gilded, if empty, perch she recovers from the events of the run up to quarantine: a string of humiliations at work, frustrations with her “ex-with benefits,” her fraught relationship with her sister, as well as several man-children with whom she’s either flirted or slept with on one or two occasions. One after another of these characters seek refuge at the penthouse with Maya, forcing her to finally stake out a territory to call her own. She emerges as the summer of social justice protests captivates the world. Maybe in the grand scheme of things she’s not so messed up after all. (Who are we kidding, of course she is.)

Grief, the transformative power of art, the meaning of family, and housing affordability are the subjects of this story about a young theater director returning to her childhood home after her mother’s unexpected death.

Gwen Rivlin, 27, wants to keep the big, shabby house with a turret in which she and her mother both grew up, but everyone tells her it’s crazy: too expensive and too suburban for her. Her schemes to stay in the house keep running up against single-family zoning laws and the disapproval of the neighbors. To help the town wrestle with the way it’s changing, and to assuage her grief, Gwen stages a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard—a play about a family struggling to hold onto its own real estate—in the turret house, casting friends, coworkers from the local coffee shop, and various community members, including her estranged-best-friend’s mother. Through the creation of this beautiful and transitory work of art, Gwen heals old breaches, reevaluates her relationship with her difficult mother, and weaves a new, non-traditional family for herself.

The Monsoon War revisits the futuristic country of Before She Sleeps, where government leaders maintain a stranglehold over women's freedom and reproductive lives. 

In a neglected southern province, a female armed resistance bands together as the Hamiyat, the protectors of those who are too weak to withstand. Now, they plan a courageous attack on the perpetrators of this regime that will free them from its tyranny forever.

Alia Musa is the wife of three husbands in a remote mountain village of Dhofar. When her youngest child, Noor, discovers a group of women who have escaped the regime to take refuge on the mountain, Alia must leave her home, join the Hamiyat resistance, and find out just how far she is willing to go for the daughters she loves, the husband she adores, and the mountain that she calls home.

As a promising young soldier in the Hamiyat, Katy Azadeh has found family and home in the resistance. Kidnapped during an unexpected skirmish and taken from the mountains, Katy is seduced by the ways of wealthy neighboring Eastern Semitia. Despite their veiled promises, Katy must find her way back to the Hamiyat to face the war that threatens their very existence.

Commander Fatima Kara is a veteran of the Hamiyat, leading her women to protect the women of the mountain villages from the government agents and the abuses of polygamy. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity from Eastern Semitia makes Fatima Kara gamble with the lives of her soldiers, to win the ultimate prize for them all—their freedom.

The Monsoon War is a near-future resistance novel that harnesses the powerful metaphor of women’s bodies as the battleground on which the wars of the future will be played out.

In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Tamar Abadi’s world collapses when her sister-in-law is killed in what appears to be a terror attack but what is really the result of a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar’s husband, Salim, is an Arab and a Jew. Torn between the two identities, and mourning his sister’s death, he uproots the family and moves them to the US. As Tamar struggles to maintain the integrity of the family’s Jewish Israeli identity against the backdrop of the American “melting pot” culture, a Palestinian family moves into the apartment upstairs and she is forced to reckon with her narrow thinking as her daughter falls in love with the Palestinian son. Fearing history will repeat itself, Tamar's determination to separate the two sets into motion a series of events that have the power to destroy her relationship with her daughter, her marriage, and the family she has worked so hard to protect.

This powerful debut novel explores Tamar's struggle to keep her family intact, to accept love that is taboo, and grapples with how exile forces us to reshape our identity in ways we could not imagine.

Soon after, she finds herself at the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition Hospice in Jaffa, a sanitorium, run by a group of nuns. Unclear as to how she got there, she begins to piece together the events that led her to this moment. From New York to Tel -Aviv, and the Siberian gulag, The World Between explores the landscape of a marriage, friendship, loss, and the way childhood war trauma bleeds into every aspect of the characters’ lives.

In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War, Tamar Abadi’s world collapses when her sister-in-law is killed in what appears to be a terror attack but what is really the result of a secret relationship with a Palestinian poet. Tamar’s husband, Salim, is an Arab and a Jew. Torn between the two identities, and mourning his sister’s death, he uproots the family and moves them to the US. As Tamar struggles to maintain the integrity of the family’s Jewish Israeli identity against the backdrop of the American “melting pot” culture, a Palestinian family moves into the apartment upstairs and she is forced to reckon with her narrow thinking as her daughter falls in love with the Palestinian son. Fearing history will repeat itself, Tamar's determination to separate the two sets into motion a series of events that have the power to destroy her relationship with her daughter, her marriage, and the family she has worked so hard to protect. 

This powerful debut novel explores Tamar's struggle to keep her family intact, to accept love that is taboo, and grapples with how exile forces us to reshape our identity in ways we could not imagine.

This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan’s most talented writers is a modern-day parable, The Handmaid’s Tale about women’s lives in repressive Muslim countries everywhere. It takes the patriarchal practices of female seclusion and veiling, gender selection, and control over women’s bodies, amplifies and distorts them in a truly terrifying way to imagine a world of post-religious authoritarianism.

A woman retreats from academic life in New York City to manage a family goat farm in New England, a novel that Richard Russo calls “splendid and provides what I crave from all stories: vividly drawn characters worth spending time with and a richly rendered place for them to inhabit."  

Lucy Richard has enjoyed a two-decade-long, successful career in public relations in New York City when she feels compelled to move back to rural Massachusetts to try to save her father’s farm. Returning to her childhood home at age 47 is hard enough, but the difficulties multiply once she’s settled in: her determination to raise dairy goats and make cheese is hampered at first by her total inexperience, and then by the sudden loss of her farming mentor. To make matters worse, her husband, Michael, who followed her to the farm reluctantly and who has made a disastrous financial decision, is suddenly in severely declining health. 

Lucy finds solace in Sandy, a girlhood companion who quickly becomes more than a friend, but their new intimacy places the Richard farm in the crosshairs of Sandy’s employer, a solar energy company. How Lucy contends with the precariousness—at once financial, physical and emotional— of her new life, and with the competing passions and obligations that grow within and around her, is at the heart of this intimate drama of love and loss, of desire and friendship, and of the alluring possibilities of second acts.

WHEN 45-YEAR-OLD MARI SARKISIAN WYATT, A FREELANCE COPY EDITOR, DECIDED TO HAVE A THIRD CHILD, SHE HAD NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS GETTING INTO, EXCEPT THAT A WOMAN HER AGE HAD A SUCCESS RATE OF LESS THAN 5% WITHOUT HELP. 

MARI wanted to take advantage of her state’s insurance mandate requiring HMO plans offered by large companies to cover infertility treatments (including three cycles of in vitro fertilization). With an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a master’s degree from Stanford, she worked for two years as a grocery bagger for a large supermarket chain in order to receive this coverage. Meanwhile, she interviewed dozens of younger, sometimes desperate women who were willing to sell their eggs in order to their rent. Pregnant at last, she endured months, then years, of ill effects, risking her health and even her life. Along the way, she met other couples who had suffered even worse setbacks and unimaginable tragedies. 

MARI SARKISIAN WYATT is a pseudonym for an Armenian-American who received her B.A. from Princeton and her M.A. from Stanford, both in English. After being deemed unemployable by multiple job agencies in her Midwestern hometown, she moved to New York City, where she worked in publishing for over a decade. Deciding that it would be too difficult to raise a family in Manhattan, she and her husband, Wesley, moved back to the Midwest, and she became a freelance copy editor to work from home, not imagining that her first child would be diagnosed with autism, which at the time, the early 1990s, was rare and considered untreatable. She and Wesley spent the first six years of their son’s life inventing therapies for him, then despite being in her forties, Mari decided that he needed a brother to teach him how to be a guy. What began as a nice idea—to have a child using assisted reproductive technology—quickly turned into an all-consuming obsession, and she spent six more years trying to fulfill that goal. Writing under a different name, Mari is the author of four romances and the co-author (with her now adult son) of two self-help guides for the parents of special-needs children.

In his final college semester, Ben awakens to read on his computer screen about the death of his classmate and childhood friend Avi. Avi’s death is sudden and senseless, killed by a drunk driver on his way back to his dorm. Here begins Ben’s story of coming to terms with loss and finding his way to adulthood. 

In the fall of 2010, with his new degree in Moral Philosophy, Ben boards a plane to Israel to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Though Ben has never held a gun, before the next summer ends, he is a trained sharpshooter. His service takes him from the Negev Desert to the Occupied Territories and Gazan border, all while finding "home" at a southern kibbutz where he is adopted as a brother and son. From Providence, Rhode Island to California and at last to Israel where Ben joins Mahal, the special set of non-Israeli-born Jews who volunteer in the IDF, he finds family where never expected, a place of his own in the Israeli mosaic. In a memoir that is both a coming-of-age story and epic ballad, Bastomski’s lyrically told story is intensely personal and ultimately universal.

As a middle child in a large military family, Christine just wants to dance. Her parents support her dreams, even if they seem beyond their comprehension. At 20, determined and talented, Christine heads across the country from Santa Fe to New York City and, in a made for-Hollywood story, is chosen for the London cast of A Chorus Line. While unwilling to fully cut ties with the traditional life her parents envision for her, she finds a new family with the dancers and more fluid, open characters that fill the theater world in London, and later New York, in the ‘70s & ‘80s. 

Christine learns that one member of her family is equally at home in her new world: Laughlin, her older brother—divorced, a father, ex-military and a corporate lawyer—also makes his way to New York City, where he meets, and begins to build a life, with rising fashion star Perry Ellis. The two men enjoy a partnership and a financial success that Christine both admires. and envies. She spends much of her free time in their Upper West Side brownstone and Water Island retreat. Soon everyone is talking about a mysterious new disease. As deaths of dancers, theater folk, and eventually friends start to mount, Christine realizes she’s in the middle of an epidemic that neither her traditional family nor the public at large is ready to reckon with. 

As the AIDS crisis cuts closer and closer, eventually impacting those she loves most, Christine does what she has always done: she strikes her own path. This memoir is an emotional, honest examination of what it takes to succeed in the competitive world of New York theater, how hard-won dreams can be quickly lost, what it means to redefine family, and the devasting toll AIDS exacted on a generation of artists.

In early 1980s Detroit, during the year following the drunk driving death of their alcoholic mother, a chorus of family voices grapple with haunting memories of the joys, regrets and the strains of love that will reverberate throughout all of their lives.

During a Detroit winter’s final snowfall in 1980, feeling fine after a few too many drinks, Hannah Fallon crashes her car through a cyclone fence and into an elm tree, leaving behind a messy wake of love and grief through which her family must wade in the year following her death. The story of the Fallon family, told in retrograde beginning a year out from Hannah’s death through the family members’ varying viewpoints, explores the humor, love, and rancor of a family grappling to keep their tight-knit bonds from unraveling. This elegy of family life under siege, written with Cheeveresque wit, clarity, and intensity, fulfills the promise of a long-awaited first novel.

As a middle child in a large military family, Christine just wants to dance. Her parents support her dreams, even if they seem beyond their comprehension. At 20, determined and talented, Christine heads across the country from Santa Fe to New York City and, in a made for-Hollywood story, is chosen for the London cast of A Chorus Line. While unwilling to fully cut ties with the traditional life her parents envision for her, she finds a new family with the dancers and more fluid, open characters that fill the theater world in London, and later New York, in the ‘70s & ‘80s. Christine learns that one member of her family is equally at home in her new world: Laughlin, her older brother—divorced, a father, ex-military and a corporate lawyer—also makes his way to New York City, where he meets, and begins to build a life, with rising fashion star Perry Ellis. The two men enjoy a partnership and a financial success that Christine both admires. and envies. She spends much of her free time in their Upper West Side brownstone and Water Island retreat. Soon everyone is talking about a mysterious new disease. As deaths of dancers, theater folk, and eventually friends start to mount, Christine realizes she’s in the middle of an epidemic that neither her traditional family nor the public at large is ready to reckon with. As the AIDS crisis cuts closer and closer, eventually impacting those she loves most, Christine does what she has always done: she strikes her own path. This memoir is an emotional, honest examination of what it takes to succeed in the competitive world of New York theater, how hard-won dreams can be quickly lost, what it means to redefine family, and the devasting toll AIDS exacted on a generation of artists.