How Do I Know You?

Five neighbors in a Philadelphia suburb pass each other in the same cemetery every day without speaking. Over one autumn, that changes. A debut novel about recognition and belonging, and the distance between the two.

We nod. We wave. We do not ask.

September, in a suburb west of Philadelphia. An old cemetery lies at the center of the neighborhood, and the people who live around it go there every day: to run, to grieve, to rehearse, to be alone.

A drama teacher directing The Crucible and quietly losing her nerve, in a house her children have left. A retired scientist trying to prove his body still works, a year into a retirement he never asked for. A hospital chaplain carrying something she has told no one. A teenage boy who comes to say his lines aloud where nobody will look at him strangely.

For weeks they pass one another. They nod. They do not stop. Then one night in late autumn, something happens that none of them can walk away from.

By November they will know each other's names, and what it cost to learn them.

How Do I Know You? is a debut novel about recognition and belonging, and the distance between the two, for readers of Tom Lake, Hello Beautiful, and The Story of Arthur Truluv.

By local author Kate McGrath.