The World Against Us

A Kanji symbol inked on his shoulder means forever, and she wears its match

Jack Courter lost his wife the night his twins were born, and for sixteen years he has poured everything he has left into the two of them: a senator's devotion, a Westchester estate, the best school in the county, and a love shadowed by the fear of losing anyone else. Jake is quiet, drifting, content in his sister's wake. Jennifer is all energy and temper and cause, the fastest runner, the loudest voice, the one who decides things. What nobody in that house lets itself see is what the two of them have become to each other.

They try the cure everyone would recommend. Other people. Dates, parties, nine months of frantic normalcy. It does not take. And when the thing between them finally will not stay behind a bedroom door, one of them runs, and then the other.

What follows is a long way down from Westchester. A steel town where the mills are closed and an old man behind a screen door stops saying hello. A stocking shift at Walmart. A basketball arena, a racing sailboat working hard to windward off a Caribbean cay, a Chicago apartment with three deadbolts. Good people, bad people, and mostly people wondering what happened to the life they had planned.

The World Against Us follows a brother and sister across early twenty-first-century America, each of them learning who they are apart, each of them knowing exactly what waits if they ever stand in the same room again.