There But For The

A wry and hilarious novel about memory and nostalgia, fate, childhood innocence, and the urge to escape-from one of our most distinctive, confident, and dazzling writers.

At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table and locks himself in the bedroom upstairs, communicating only through notes slipped under the door to his hosts. In an act of desperation, Genevieve Lee, the owner of the house, summons Anna, a woman Miles knew briefly as a teenager, and asks her to help lure Miles away from the room. For some odd reason she agrees, and finds herself thrust into the world of the Lees, their precocious nine-year-old neighbor Brooke, their dinner guest Mark, and May, an elderly woman in a nursing home. Though each of these characters knows Miles only slightly, his self-imposed isolation serves as the central event linking them to each other and to their own pasts.

As Smith explores the internal motivations and histories of each of these characters, she creates a powerful portrait of memory and forgetting, loss and retrieval. Disarmingly playful, full of wit and puns, and beautifully written, There But For The is a novel of the human need for separation-from our pasts, from each other-and of the redemptive possibilities for connection.