Life Between Seconds

For fans of Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! comes a new tale of found family and magic. After his mother dies, Peter Berry collects memories in broken watches the way others collect photographs. Peter takes his box filled with broken watches and flees his childhood home to a battered apartment complex in San Francisco—his mother’s favorite city—in an attempt to bury the box with the dark truths of her haunting memory before she returns to take him too. The night Sofia Morales’s daughter disappears, Sofia begins to hear her daughter’s voice. Her world crumbles—her marriage crumbles. After demanding her husband leave, Sofia runs from Buenos Aires, Argentina to San Francisco—a city she always wanted to visit—renting an apartment in a beat-up complex at the edge of North Beach and blasting the radio to escape the voice of whom she can’t bear to listen. Peter and Sophia become close friends in the confined space of the city, finding companionship in the shadow of their unspoken nightmares. When Sofia receives a letter from her estranged husband, and Peter proves unable to bury his box of watches, the ghosts of their pasts once more threaten the lives they have created, now tearing at the fabric of their friendship with the tormented memories they keep, whether real or imagined. Unfolding over three decades, Life Between Seconds sets Peter and Sophia on a collision course with their respective pasts propelling them toward either redemption or damnation. Engrossing, heartbreaking, and surreal Douglas Weissman’s first adult novel is a meditation on trauma, family, and how to heal after a great loss.