Another Kind of Symmetry

• Winner of the 2024 Permafrost Book Prize in Fiction
• Selected by Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Eowyn Ivey
• Forthcoming in June 2026

This is a wonderful, rich novel about the push and pull of family and home. The descriptions of Agni’s experiences in Greece, with its ghosts, family history, and village life, contrast sharply with that of her sister Effie’s search for art, freedom, and individuality in New York. I was equally drawn to both of them, and I felt their frustrations and yearnings. The writing is so well-honed and detailed that I was confident all along that I was in good hands, even as I was transported from one place to another. The story never lagged – I was eager to learn the fate of these two young women. And the novel asks interesting questions about how we maintain our deep ties with family and ancestry while also carving out new lives for ourselves. In the end, the novel shows the painful but heartfelt truth: it is never simple. – Eowyn Ivey

Agni and Effie, identical twins, are inseparable until Agni is sent to Greece one summer to visit their grandmother after their grandfather’s sudden death. Until now the more conventional and accommodating of the two, Agni refuses to return to college, choosing instead to remain in their family’s Greek village.

She is drawn into the daily routines and rural traditions that her parents left behind in exchange for the American dream. But the haunting presence of her grandfather’s ghost is a sign of unresolved family grief.

Without her sister’s companionship, Effie abruptly abandons the stability of her life so far and moves to the East Village to live as an artist. But when Agni’s absence become unbearable for her, a personal crisis brings the sisters together again, this time even closer than before.

Alternating between the sisters’ points of view, letters between them, and stories Agni writes in secret, Another Kind of Symmetry explores the sometimes uneasy relationship that children of immigrants have with their parents’ version of the American dream. It reflects on the challenges of living with cross-cultural traditions and how individuals’ different responses to them can disrupt even the closest of relationships.