Shapiro, Dani

Dani Shapiro is a bestselling novelist, 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 co-founded the Sirenland Writers Conference. Signal Fires: A Novel (Knopf) opens on a summer night in 1985. Three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes. Each of their lives, and that of Ben Wilf, a young doctor who arrives on the scene, is shattered. For the Wilf family, the circumstances of the accident become a secret so dangerous it can never be spoken. But time moves on and when the Shenkmans – a young couple expecting a baby boy – arrive, it’s as if the accident never happened. Then Waldo, the Shenkmans’ brilliant, lonely son, befriends Ben. He’s now retired and struggling with his wife’s decline, and past events come hurtling back in ways no one could ever have foreseen. Signal Fires illuminates the ties that bind families together and the secrets that can break them apart.