Dani Shapiro • Inheritance

Paperback & Podcast Tour

Monday, 1/27 – Portsmouth, NH

With author of The Body Keeps Score, Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk

Tuesday, 1/28 – New York City, NY

With country music star & author of Blood, Allison Moorer

Wednesday, 1/29 – Philadelphia, PA

With author of The Happiness Projects, Gretchen Rubin

Thursday, 1/30 – San Francisco, CA

With author of Cutting For Stone, Abraham Verghese

Friday, 1/31 – Los Angeles, CA

with rock star & author of Horror Stories, Liz Phair

The publication of Inheritance continues to be an amazing, wild ride! To every single one of my readers and listeners of “Family Secrets,” thank you!! It’s so meaningful to me that the stories I share have connected with so many of you. The paperback of Inheritance comes out at the end of this month, and though I won’t be traveling at the same pace as I did for all of 2019, I will be embarking on a five-day, five-city tour. I’m so excited to share the details and would be thrilled to meet you at one of these events! You’ve told me so many of your moving, powerful, heart-rending stories. This is a chance to gather together. In honor of the paperback launch, this will be a live podcast tour for my podcast “Family Secrets.” With my extraordinary hand-picked guests, we will be talking intimately about big subjects: secrets, discoveries, DNA testing, genealogy, identity, trauma, and the liberation that comes from knowing the truth of oneself. I hope you’ll join me at one of the events listed above and be part of a conversation with some of the greatest thinkers, writers, and artists of our time. Tickets are now available.

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.

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.

Find Out More

See All Appearances

Dani Shapiro wins her second National Jewish Book Award, and her first JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction, for Signal Fires.

Signal Fires named one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2022 and Must Read Books of 2022

Dani Shapiro Shares Excerpt From Her Upcoming Novel Signal Fires, Her ‘Most Personal Book’ Yet

Read the excerpt in People

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Entertainment Weekly announces Dani’s forthcoming novel – the first in 15 years! – Signal Fires. Knopf will publish in fall 2022.

The paperback edition of Inheritance is an LA Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and San Francisco Chronicle, and National Indie bestseller!

Dani’s podcast, “Family Secrets” launched into the top 10 of all podcasts on Apple! The podcast has over 33 million downloads, and its ninth season launched on November 9, 2023. Its tenth season is currently in production.

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