It’s possible to grow up in the wrong house on the wrong street, in the wrong town, in the wrong part of the country. It is possible to go to the wrong school. Have the wrong Dad. To be pushed to do the wrong things. But it is also possible to survive all these psychic indignities if you have one, maybe two people who recognize you for who you are.”

SHAPIRO: Yeah, exactly. I mean, the Wilf family at the end of that evening has a shared secret - not just keeping it from the rest of the world, but keeping it from each other, never speaking of it within their family. And the novel in so many ways is about the aftermath. and a huge ‘hug-of-love’ thanks to Dani Shapiro for writing this book. It was a pure and personal gift to my soul. Stunning in depth and breadth, this luminous examination of loss and acceptance, furtiveness and reliability, abandonment and friendship ultimately blazes with profound revelations...Like creating an intricate origami puzzle, Shapiro folds together the events that define these lives over decades, focusing on specific interludes to divulge old secrets or bury new ones. Returning to fiction after touching readers with her courageous and probing memoirs, including Inheritance, Shapiro delivers keen perceptions about family dynamics via fictional characters that exude a rare combination of substance and delicacy." - Booklist (starred review)Waldo had a brilliant mind. The journey we take with him, his parents, Dr. Ben Wilk— (his own coming-of-age tale) —will touch the most common elements of the heart. SIMON: Wow. Does the selfless gesture Sarah, the older sister, undertakes for her brother wind up burdening their whole family? In light of the current crisis, the signal fires will create beacons across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland warning of the threat the industry continues to face while celebrating the extraordinary vibrancy of touring theatre and the freelancers they engage. Stretching across four nations, this festival of fires will connect audiences, freelance artists and touring companies together in a communal, national act of storytelling. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored. Yeah,” Waldo says. He’s looking straight ahead, though not at anything in particular. “Everything is connected. Everything. The lady. The doctor. Me. You. It’s like we’re part of a galactic supercluster.”

I like the story but the timeline is dizzying. It's present day, past, and future and multiple characters. However, I was able to follow the audiobook so the story was good and got me cry a few times. Waldo is so sweet. I admire Ben's marriage but I don't like that their family don't communicate enough.

It is a story of a single tragedy of a family, a neighborhood, of relationships, and of how one event in a family's history can change everything. On the way home from a party, 15-year-old Theo Wilf crashes his parents’ car, killing one of the passengers. His sister, Sarah, claims she was driving to protect her brother, and over the following 30 years, their mutual guilt affects the siblings in different ways. Meanwhile, their father befriends a neglected but intellectually prodigious boy obsessed with the cosmos. Shapiro’s tender and philosophical novel oscillates between timeframes and perspectives, exploring loneliness, penitence and the connectedness of human experience. If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity SHAPIRO: I experience it that way. When I put this book in the drawer 15 years ago, I had a lot more life to live to be able to really tell this story. I'll tell you one very extraordinary, mystical thing that is part of the book, which is that - so I began the book 15 years ago. And then about seven years later, I discovered that my dad, who raised me, had not been my biological father. I created the character of Ben Wilf seven or eight years before I made that discovery. He is just like my biological father. He has the same medical profession. He looks like him. He very much has his nature. What does that mean, that I imagined and conjured this fully fleshed out character that was not - you know, was not something in any way based on someone that I knew existed? Dani Shapiro seems to sit perfectly within this particular tradition — an author whose popularity sometimes masks a radical and innovative approach to form. Signal Fires, Shapiro’s sixth novel, takes place over 50 years in the fictional town of Avalon, New York State.

Urgent and compassionate, SIGNAL FIRES is a magical story for our times, a literary tour de force by a masterful storyteller at the height of her powers. It's a luminous meditation on family, memory and the healing power of interconnectedness. For a century, the memory of fire beacons in England was all but lost to time. In the 1800s and early 1900s, the networks eroded, the maps were mostly forgotten. A renewed interest flared up with archaeological pursuits of the twentieth century, and today, beacons nod to eternal flames, honoring landmark occasions: Queen Elizabeth’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees, the 400th anniversary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the hundred-year anniversary of the end of the First World War. Just as on Independence Day in the U.S., and on Bastille Day in France, people who could not be more divided will be connected for some bright, firelit minutes, when fireworks explode above them. Fuel’s Signal Fires Co-Produced by Fuel and Coombe Farm Studios and Eden Court Highlands in collaboration with The Woodland Presents Signal Fires.A TIME Best Fiction Book of the Year • A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year Our nodes can provide both communications and power to your sensors, making your application truly wireless. A wide range of sensor types are compatible, including 4-20 mA, 1.5V, Modbus, Hart, Digital I/O and other analog and digital interfaces. I love character driven books and circuitous family dramas, but this felt absolutely directionless. And the way it jumped around from character to character and timeline to timeline only served to make me feel even more disassociated from the story (if you can even say there was one) and its players. Dani Shapiro's first work of fiction in 15 years is a beautifully written, poignant story about two families and how their lives are connected. Gripping from the start... beautifully written, Shapiro explores time, memory and our human interconnectedness to create a tender, moving portrayal of the ripple effect one event and on person's actions can have on many lives Woman & Home *Book of the Month*

SIMON: Yeah. And it's a very engaging family, the Wilfs. I mean, Ben, the father, is a doctor and, from the evidence we are allowed to see, a very good doctor, although he does make one mistake - his spouse, Mimi; Sarah, their daughter; Theo, their son. But tell us about the little boy across the street. Fuel’s Signal Fires project reached audiences in South Devon and in the Highlands. From 28-30 October, audiences heard stories from around the world, around campfires in the beautiful woods at Dartington. Performed by actors around socially distanced fires, audiences were taken on a journey around the world from the safety and warmth of a blanket and a hot drink. From 2-7 November, audiences in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, where live outdoor performances were not permitted under Covid-19 guidelines, heard stories told to them over the phone, live and in person. To say that I was eagerly and enthusiastically awaiting Dani Shapiro's first fiction book in 15 years was an understatement.What is left to her? She rarely lets herself think this way, but something about this day is making her melancholy. That young family across the street with their new baby is at the beginning of a life that they think will last forever”.