Dani Shapiro is a bestselling novelist and memoirist and host of the podcast Family Secrets (now in its sixth season). Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Time. She has taught at Columbia and New York University and is the co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference. Her new novel, Signal Fires, will be published by Knopf in October.
Signal Fires: A Gripping New Novel From the Author of Inheritance
NATIONAL BEST SELLER • From the beloved author of Inheritance: “a haunting, moving, and propulsive exploration of family secrets” (Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings)
A TIME Best Fiction Book of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year • Winner of The National Jewish Book Award
Two families. One night. A constellation of lives changed forever.
An ancient majestic oak stands beneath the stars on Division Street. And under the tree sits Ben Wilf, a retired doctor, and ten-year-old Waldo Shenkman, a brilliant, lonely boy who is pointing out his favorite constellations. Waldo doesn’t realize it but he and Ben have met before. And they will again, and again. Across time and space, and shared destiny.
Division Street is full of secrets. An impulsive lie begets a secret—one which will forever haunt the Wilf family. And the Shenkmans, who move into the neighborhood many years later, bring secrets of their own.. Spanning fifty kaleidoscopic years, on a street—and in a galaxy—where stars collapse and stories collide, these two families become bound in ways they never could have imagined.
Urgent and compassionate, Signal Fires is a magical story for our times, a literary tour de force by a masterful storyteller at the height of her powers. A luminous meditation on family, memory, and the healing power of interconnectedness.
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?
In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history–the life she had lived–crumbled beneath her.
Inheritance is a book about secrets–secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman’s urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in–a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.
Upcoming Appearances
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Newtown, CT
Newtown Talks Series: Edmond Town Hall at 7:00 PM
Family Secrets and Purposeful Storytelling
Sunday, November 24, 2024
Miami, FL
Miami Book Fair: Chapman Conference Center at 3:00 PM
For her podcast Family Secrets, author DANI SHAPIRO interviews actor, director, producer, and writer GRIFFIN DUNNE about his dazzling new book, The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir– an exploration of what it means to be from a family of storytellers, justice-seekers, and secret-keepers in Hollywood. The fame at this illustrious family’s core has defined them. But beneath that fame are the secrets that shaped them.
Thursday, January 9, 2025
Key West, FL
Key West Literary Seminar
The Key West Literary Seminar is a four-day literary celebration that explores a different theme each year. In January 2025, the theme is o family — the one we’re born into, those we’ve later built or chosen, and the ones we’ve lost or found or run as far away from as possible.
Registration opens March 7, 2024.