A dazzling, kaleidoscopic debut novel about the life of a precocious girl in Philadelphia trying to figure out who—or what—she is.

One afternoon, on a visit to the Bronx Zoo, a jaguar tells six-year-old Grace Goldberg-Li she isn’t human. Not that this comes as a total surprise. Her life looks normal, but no one else, not even her beloved sister, seems to be experiencing things as brightly and painfully as she does. As she approaches adolescence, Grace begins to think that she might be an alien. Maybe this would explain the urge to steal every beautiful object she can find, or the peculiar voice that’s started issuing apocalyptic warnings inside her head.

In adulthood, Grace still can’t figure it out. Is it the world that’s crazy and falling apart? Or is it her? She will attempt, over and over, to remake herself and find her place in it. She will fall recklessly in love with a gorgeous doctoral student; she will live as a tree in a backyard during the pandemic; she will become the best employee that Wendy’s has ever seen; she will travel to the ends of the earth and keep going.

Moving, imaginative, and endlessly surprising, Universe of Grace is at once a tender family portrait, a queer love story, and an epic quest for self-discovery in a world that’s uncertain and wondrous in equal measure. Covering the span of a single life and everything it touches, Universe of Grace shows us that we are each more interconnected and vast than we can ever know.