All This Could Be Different - Sarah Thankam Mathews - 2022
By: Sarah Thankam Mathews
Narrated by: Reena Dutt
Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 08-02-22
Categories: Literature & Fiction, LGBTQ+, Coming of Age, Asian American
Language: English
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Format: mp3 64/48 stereo
Named a best book of the summer by NPR, People, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, The Cut, Vogue, Elle, Good Housekeeping, Parade, Harper's Bazaar, NYLON, The Millions, Electric Lit, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and more
A Phenomenal Book Club Pick • A Vogue Book Club Pick • A Good Housekeeping Book Club Pick • A The Rumpus Book Club Pick • An Autostraddle Book Club Pick
“One of the buzziest, most human novels of the year…breathless, dizzying, and completely beautiful.” —Vogue
“Dazzling and wholly original...[written] with such mordant wit, insight, and specificity, it feels like watching a new literary star being born in real time.” –Entertainment Weekly
From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself—a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first-century America
Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women—soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach.
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.
A beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose, All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world.
©2022 Sarah Thankam Mathews (P)2022 Penguin Audio
Critic Reviews
“What fuels [All This Could Be Different] is love, a force Mathews portrays not as a panacea [...] but as an instrument of change.” —The New Yorker
“Both lyrical and page-turning . . . All This Could Be Different, in which the lives of a group of millennials become fascinatingly entangled [...] offers us a panoramic view of mingled desires, fears, and joys that will be familiar to readers of Eliot and Austen, but [Mathews] does them one better: her novel is about an underrepresented first-generation immigrant, and it’s incredibly gay.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“This bold and wide-ranging novel sets its sights on what it really means to be 'okay' . . . [asking] questions that have consumed innumerable 20-somethings . . . Mathews expertly captures and elevates the position of being a young queer person in the post-recession U.S. with many more questions than answers.” —Emma Spector, Vogue
24/7 Seedbox Support
