Who You Might Be

Told in three distinct, brilliantly interlocking narratives, Leigh Gallagher’s Who You Might Be is a fiercely original debut audiobook that takes readers from 1990s Southern California to a UFOlogist holdout in the Nevada desert, the graffiti underworld of Detroit, and the self-important Brooklyn art scene to present an unflinching examination of trauma.

It’s the dawn of internet culture when adolescent friends Judy and Meghan run away for the weekend, determined to meet up with Meghan’s online chatroom friend Cassie, a master of the eating disorder tricks Meghan is only starting to employ. The trip becomes dramatically derailed when the girls realize that Cassie not only isn’t home, she may not even have been the one chatting with them. Before its end, the girls will learn startling things about both the dangers that lurk in plain sight, and each other.

Meanwhile, across the country, the newly graduated Caleb and his introverted younger brother Miles both feel completely alienated after their mother relocates the family to Ann Arbor, Michigan from the comparatively glamorous Bay Area. Caleb starts filling his empty hours roaming a blighted Detroit, where he befriends Tez, a gifted graffiti writer whose complicated past soon puts Miles in jeopardy.

Years later, these seemingly unrelated stories collide in 2016 Brooklyn in an astonishing, unforgettable finale. Peopled with precisely drawn, indelible characters pushed to great extremes, at its core, Who You Might Be investigates the myriad ways we confront or deny power and trauma, and how, ultimately, we find the resilience to determine for ourselves who we might be.

A Macmillan Audio production from Holt.