On a summer evening in the 1990s, Anne learns that one of her husband’s lovers is expecting his child, only a few weeks after learning that she herself is pregnant. He tells her casually over dinner, as if it’s just another colorful story about his afternoon. And the tenuous understanding between them—the careful balance of privacy and flexibility that has sustained their open relationship to date—is shattered.

Meanwhile, Sandy, the other lover, works to find her path forward through a surprise pregnancy and all the million tiny miracles and catastrophes that she now has to navigate, often entirely on her own. Caught between the risk of relying on others and the risk of being alone, searching through diaries and grocery lists and seances with the dead, she tries to remember just enough of her original sense of direction to find her way home.

“Reading Likeness, I couldn’t help marveling at how well Samsun Knight knows Anne, Sebastian, and Sandy, and how deftly he delineates their many changes of heart. He has an exquisite gift for capturing those moments when a character reaches the edge of their known feelings and steps into terra incognita. The result is a wonderfully suspenseful and deeply pleasurable novel.”
—Margot Livesey, author, The Flight of Gemma Hardy

“Samsun Knight’s Likeness is a beautifully rendered short novel full of twisting, complexly twined threads, a fascinating tangle of family connections that explores the parts of ourselves we inherit from our kin—and the parts of ourselves we invent. Knight is a remarkable writer.”
—Dan Chaon, author and National Book Award Finalist, Sleepwalk

“Likeness is propulsive, hilarious, moving, and profound. It’s also a page-turner about a love triangle and the challenges of finding a stable, if unconventional, relationship. Even more than that, it’s about how hard it is to articulate what we really want from love, parenthood, or even life in general.”
—Maria Kuznetsova, author, Something Unbelievable

“Knight rearranges and refracts what we thought we knew of the domestic drama and gives it new shape. Likeness shimmers like a house of mirrors with its continuously distorting understandings of what love is supposed to be. Tender, infuriating, redeeming, and graceful. I devoured it.”
—Eskor David Johnson, author, Pay As You Go

“David Foster Wallace once said his tastes in reading turned toward the realistic because most experimental stuff was hellaciously unfun to read. The genius of Likeness is to pair experiment with realism, asking really fun questions of old forms, delivering both the story of love and a slant and sly look at how we tell those stories. The power-to-weight ratio here is perfect. Everything’s up for negotiation: monogamy, fidelity, marriage, babies. How do we come to know each other, how do we gather and bind, how do we deepen and endure and go on, what arrangements are we making for love? It’s said that happy love has no history, but Likeness, in its brief and brilliant moment, is a joy to read, and that’s plenty.”
—Charles D’Ambrosio, author, The Dead Fish Museum

Forthcoming from University of Iowa Press in Summer 2025. Preorder today.