Esther, an American art conservator, has fled New York for London-partly to escape her failing marriage, partly to tend to her dying mother. On her first night there, she spots a young man returning home very late, wet and muddy, to the house next door. Their eyes connect and he disappears inside.

This first encounter sparks Esther's curiosity about her new neighbors: Amir, the moody college student she caught sneaking in, and, more intruiguing still, Amir's father, Javad-a neuroscientist from Iran.

Throughout the spring, a tentative friendship blossoms, but when terrorists attack London's tube and bus lines in July, Esther finds her relationship with Javad strained by her gnawing suspicions about Amir . . . suspicions that will ultimately upend the possibilities for the future, and reveal the deep stamp of the past.

Sweeping, suspenseful, and exquisitely written, Underground Fugue is a powerful testament to how human connection can survive history's most fearsome echoes.

Auteur

Margot Singer won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award for her story collection, The Pale of Settlement. Her work has been featured on NPR and in the Kenyon Review, the Gettysburg Review, Agni, and Conjunctions, among other publications. She is a professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.