Life and Other Inconveniences

Emma London has not spoken to her grandmother Genevieve in years. Taken in as a teenager after her mother's death and then sent away, Emma built a life of her own in Chicago as a therapist and a single mother to her daughter Riley. Then Genevieve calls: she is dying, and she wants Emma and Riley to come home to Connecticut for the summer.

Genevieve London is a fashion-empire founder, imperious and impossible, and she has never recovered from the disappearance of her young son Sheppard decades ago — a loss that shaped how she treated everyone who came after him. What she wants from Emma now is not simple, and Emma has her own reasons for going: Riley is struggling, and Emma's estranged father is somewhere in the picture too.

A multi-generational novel about inheritance, grief, and the difference between the family you are given and the family you choose.