At twenty-three, Alice Hare leaves England for New York. Blinded by the city lights, Alice becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, a Japanese writer living in New York, whose life story has strange parallels to her own and whom she believes is her "internet twin." What seems to Mizuko like a chance encounter with Alice is anything but—after all, in the age of connectivity, nothing is coincidence. Their subsequent relationship is doomed from the outset, exposing a tangle of lies and sexual encounters as three families across the globe collide, and the most ancient of questions—where do we come from—is answered just by searching online.

In its heady evocation of everything from Haruki Murakami to Patricia Highsmith to Edith Wharton, Sympathy is utterly original—a thrilling tale of obsession, doubling, blood ties, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age.