Any Kind of Known Tomorrow

Overview

It's March 2020 and Hadley Parris is faltering. She's just been told she has multiple sclerosis, her teenage daughter is about to grow up and away, her opinionated mother wants to talk about the virus everyone's worried about, and Hadley's student needs a place to stay. Hadley’s small Brooklyn apartment becomes a pressure cooker in which four women must navigate a rapidly unfolding pandemic, a bee invasion—and each other.

Hadley, eager to be helpful, takes in her gifted student, Anna. Anna, who is living with the aftermath of family violence, would prefer to imagine a future in which she doesn’t need anyone at all. Hadley's daughter, Isabelle, grieves an increasingly bleak climate outlook while feeling torn between her mother's needs and her mercurial Australian-born grandmother Aileen. Bees continue to emerge from the growing hive inside Hadley’s kitchen wall. Meanwhile, Anna's Australian-born mother, Miranda, is in the hospital recovering from a near-fatal incident and hopes for forgiveness that may not be forthcoming.

As a field hospital is erected in Central Park and New Yorkers pause each evening to cheer emergency responders, Hadley's discovery of genealogical ties dating back to the Salem witch trials forces her to confront family secrets and reckon with the legacy of her ancestors. Full of compassionate insight and incisive wit, Any Kind of Known Tomorrow is a provocative, sweeping meditation on immigration, family ties, and the ways that we must all face the future—together.

Reviews

“Leah De Forest's novel is a vivid portrait of a world in existential turmoil, illustrated by an admirably negotiated array of levels: the personal, the local, the national, international, and, finally, universal. It is a book for our times.” —Antonya Nelson, author of Bound 

“Leah De Forest's Any Kind of Known Tomorrow is a tour-de-force of empathy, and incisively captures that unimaginable moment in 2020—when all our anchors were abruptly pulled up, and together-alone we found ourselves at sea with no land in sight. De Forest's ensemble cast spans generations, nationalities, and social classes, and manages to both telescope us into the unnerving claustrophobia of pandemic lockdown in New York City, and widen our perspective on history, mental health, privilege, the environment, and familial ties. An impressive debut”. —Sonya Chung, author of The Loved Ones and Long for This World 

“Any Kind of Known Tomorrow is a beautifully written, piercing story of five extraordinary women—and all the lives that touch theirs—in New York in the early lockdown days of COVID-19. They wrestle with family histories and secrets, illness and responsibility, loneliness and connection, complicity and identity, and the collision of the natural and humanmade worlds. This absorbing, moving account of survival and reinvention shows both the costs and the unexpected gifts of living in an increasingly fragile world.” —Sarah Stone, author of Marriage to the Sea 

"A deeply affecting novel about a deeply troubling time in New York City." —David Haynes, author of Martha's Daughter

Author Biography