What We Leave Behind
  • Published:
    Jun-2025
    Jun-24-2025 (Release)
  • Formats:
    Print / eBook / Audio
  • Main Genre:
    General Fiction
  • Pages:
    352
  • Purchase:
  • Share:
From the author of Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, a tenderhearted story of two very different women grappling with the messy emotional legacies passed down by their parents -- for fans of Dani Shapiro, Ann Napolitano, and Jody Picoult.

It's the perennial question: are we a product of how we were raised, or is our identity hardwired by our genetic inheritance? When her adoptive mother dies in a freak accident, high school senior Melody Marcus doubles down on her refusal to learn anything about her birth parents. In this age of 23&me, though, that may not be possible, and the secrets hidden in her DNA threaten to upend everything she knows about herself and her family. 

For Candace Milton, a successful woman in her forties, the collateral damage from her parents' tortured marriage has led to a life of intentional unattachment. She is happy -- enough. But a chance encounter with a friend of Melody's father will challenge this assumption and force her to reimagine who she is and who she might become.

Big-hearted evocative, and achingly relatable, What We Leave Behind grapples with destiny, belonging, and love, and makes us question our own idea of family: the kind we're born into and the kind we create.  
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EDITIONS
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    • First Edition
    • Jun-2025
    • HarperCollins
    • Trade Paperback
    • ISBN: 0063415380
    • ISBN13: 9780063415386
    •  
    • Jun-2025
    • HarperCollins
    • eBook
    • ISBN: 0063415399
    • ISBN13: 9780063415393
    •  
    • Jun-2025
    • Harper Perennial
    • eBook (Kindle)



View the Complete Sue Halpern Book List