Margot Singer

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning fiction writer MARGOT SINGER, author of The Pale of Settlement, and AGNI senior editor WILLIAM PIERCE for a discussion of Singer's debut novel, Underground Fugue.

About Underground Fugue

Esther, an American art conservator, has fled New York for London—partly to escape her failing marriage, partly to tend to her dying mother. On her first night there, she spots a young man returning home very late, wet and muddy, to the house next door. Their eyes connect and he disappears inside. 

This first encounter sparks Esther’s curiosity about her new neighbors: Amir, the moody college student she caught sneaking in, and, more intruiguing still, Amir’s father, Javad—a neuroscientist from Iran.         

Throughout the spring, a tentative friendship blossoms, but when terrorists attack London’s tube and bus lines in July, Esther finds her relationship with Javad strained by her gnawing suspicions about Amir . . . suspicions that will ultimately upend the possibilities for the future, and reveal the deep stamp of the past. 

Sweeping, suspenseful, and exquisitely written, Underground Fugue is a powerful testament to how human connection can survive history’s most fearsome echoes.

Praise

"In this extraordinarily accomplished debut novel, Margot Singer confronts life’s essential losses—aging, illness, accidental death—but also the scalding, self-inflicted wounds of alienation, estrangement and prejudice. The book’s tender, questing spirit imbues even these dark recesses with a kind of luminosity, making Underground Fugue a pleasure to read from beginning to end." —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March

"Singer’s novel travels up and down the scale of sorrow, reflecting the musical and psychological connotations of her title . . . This haunting story.feels suspended in a murky state between memory and presence, happiness and despair.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“Thrilling, tender, and dangerously seductive, Underground Fugue is an exhilarating journey into the perilous depths of London’s tunnels and the bewildering labyrinth of the human heart.” —Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River