Dani Shapiro’s first novel since 2007 is coming out next year.
Knopf will publish Shapiro’s Signal Fires in the fall of 2022, the publisher announced in a news release. The press describes the book as “an electrifying novel about a fateful decision made in a split-second that sets off a chain of events with profound consequences for two families over several generations.”
“It is 1985 when the novel opens with three teenagers in a car, the driver impaired,” Knopf says. “A horrific accident results in the death of a young woman. For the family of the driver responsible, it will become the deepest kind of secret, one so dangerous it can never be spoken.”
Shapiro made her literary debut in 1990 with the novel Playing With Fire, and followed it up three years later with Fugitive Blue. Her most recent novel, Black and White, was published in 2007.
Since then, she has focused mainly on memoirs, including the bestselling Devotion and, most recently, Inheritance, which a critic for Kirkus called “her best book.”
Shapiro said that Signal Fires was inspired by “recent epiphanies from my family history.”
“There’s a haunting question at the center of the book,” she said. “Is the past ever really past, and what is the price of denying our own history? In Signal Fires, each character is haunted, their lives shaped by what they can’t allow themselves to know or feel.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
