Universe of Grace

A dazzling, kaleidoscopic debut novel about the life of a precocious girl in Philadelphia trying to figure out who—or what—she might be

One afternoon, on a visit to the Bronx Zoo, a jaguar tells six-year-old Grace Goldberg-Li that she isn’t human. But this is something that Grace has already suspected. Her life seems normal, but no one else, not even her beloved sister seems to be experiencing things as brightly and painfully as she does. As she approaches adolescence, Grace begins to think that she might be an alien. Maybe this would explain the urge to steal every beautiful object she can find, or the peculiar voice in her head that’s fixated on the apocalypse of climate change, insisting that everyone she loves is going to die.

In adulthood, Grace still doesn’t have the answer to the strangeness that seems to be outside and inside her. Is it the world that is unusual and falling apart? Or is it her? She will attempt, over and over, to remake herself and find a place in it. She will fall recklessly in love with a gorgeous doctoral student; she will merge into a tree during the pandemic; she will become the best employee that Wendy’s has ever seen; she will travel to the ends of the earth and keep going.

Tender, profound, and endlessly imaginative, Rachel Calnek-Sugin’s Universe of Grace is a transcendent coming-of-age story in a world that’s uncertain and wondrous in equal measure. Covering the span of a single life and everything it touches, Universe of Grace shows us that we are each more interconnected, vast, and variable than we can ever know.