You Remind Me of Me: A Novel

A “delicately hypnotic [and] haunting” (The New York Times) novel that weaves together the lives of four very different characters to explore identity, fate, and the ties that bind, from the award-winning author of Among the Missing

“Remarkable . . . You Remind Me of Me succeeds because it makes us feel its characters’ pain and inhabit a world in which desperate measures often seem like the only ones available.”—The Washington Post Book World

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer

You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother’s pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother’s backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better.

With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaon explores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and circumstance: Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?

In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of “ordinary” people.