People magazine Best New Book, July 2025
On a summer evening in the 1990s, Anne learns that one of her husbandās lovers is expecting his child, only a few weeks after learning that she too is pregnant. He tells her casually, as if itās just another colorful story about his day. And the tenuous understanding between themāthe careful balance of privacy and flexibility that has sustained their open marriage to dateāis shattered.
Meanwhile, Sandy, the lover, works to find her own path forward through her surprise pregnancy and all the million tiny miracles and catastrophes that she must now navigate, often entirely on her own. Searching through diaries and grocery lists and seances with the dead, Sandy tries to remember just enough of her original sense of direction to make her own way home.
āĮ豚²¹»å¾±²Ō²µ Likeness, I couldnāt 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.āāMargot Livesey, author, The Flight of Gemma Hardy
āDavid Foster Wallace 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. Everythingās 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? Itās said that happy love has no history, but Likeness, in its brief and brilliant moment, is a joy to read, and thatās plenty.āāCharles DāAmbrosio, author, The Dead Fish Museum
āLikeness 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 kināand the parts of ourselves we invent. Knight is a remarkable writer.āāDan Chaon, author, Sleepwalk
āLikeness is propulsive, hilarious, moving, and profound. Itās also a page-turner about a love triangle and the challenges of finding a stable, if unconventional, relationship. Even more than that, itās about how hard it is to articulate what we really want from love, parenthood, or even life in general.āāMaria Kuznetsova, author, Something Unbelievable
āKnight 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.āāEskor David Johnson, author, Pay as You Go
āA relatable tale of companionship, jealousy, and how motherhood changes everything.āāPeople Magazine
āThis slim but delightful book intimately tracks the love, hurt, change of heart, and mindset shifts of each woman with skillful writing and deft insights.āāLee Woodruff
