Literary Fiction spotlight
This Is Not About Us
by Allegra Goodman
Three sisters, one apple cake, and a decade-long rift nobody can explain to outsiders.
Buy the book
In the wake of their sister's death, two surviving sisters try to understand how an argument over an apple cake created a rift that lasted ten years.
Publisher's blurb
Synopsis
Goodman writes families the way few novelists dare: at full, exasperating, loving length. Following a death, two sisters reconstruct the pettiest possible origin of their estrangement and find, underneath it, decades of unequal caretaking and unspoken accounting. Domestic fiction with the precision of a legal deposition.
The editorial feature
Nobody currently writing is better on the specific comedy of siblings. The apple cake is both a joke and a load-bearing wall, and the book knows exactly when to stop being funny.
Book details
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
- Released
- 10 February 2026
- Publisher
- The Dial Press
- Featured on
- 10 February 2026
Where to buy
This Is Not About Us is available from these retailers.
Related spotlights
All spotlights →
Literary Fiction
4.5Dream Count
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Four women, three continents, and the private accounting each of them keeps of the life they meant to have.
Released 4 March 2025
Read spotlight →
Literary Fiction
4.4We Do Not Part
by Han Kang
A writer travels through a blizzard to save a friend's bird, and walks into the buried history of Jeju Island.
Released 21 January 2025
Read spotlight →
Literary Fiction
4.3Flesh
by David Szalay
From a Hungarian housing estate to Mayfair money, a life told almost entirely in what its owner will not say.
Released 3 April 2025
Read spotlight →
Literary Fiction
4.1Theft
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Three young Tanzanians come of age as tourism, NGOs and old family debts rearrange Zanzibar around them.
Released 18 March 2025
Read spotlight →