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A fascinating debut story about how we connect in the digital age, it plays on the idea that everything we portray online is seen through a filter by others. A highly topical novel which questions the extent of our digital identity and the reality of the intimacies we form.
About the author
Olivia Sudjic was born in London in 1988. She studied English Literature at Cambridge University where she was awarded the E.G. Harwood English Prize and made a Bateman Scholar. She started writing her first novel, Sympathy, in 2014.
Summary
At 23, Alice Hare leaves England for New York - the city of her birth, before she was adopted by a British mother and an American father. As she falls in love with the big city, she also becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer living in New York whose life has strange parallels with her own. Their 'chance' encounter and subsequent relationship expose a dark tangle of lies and sexual encounters as three families across the globe collide, and the most ancient of questions - where do we come from? - can be answered just by searching online.
Sympathy is a brilliant and deeply moving take on personal accountability, blood ties, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age. It examines how we relate to each other and the world around us in an age of hyperconnectivity and algorithms.
Foreword
Virtual selves become tangled and real-life family secrets collide in a captivating tale of online obsession
