The Daughters

Renowned—albeit washed-up—author Peter Zemeckis’s new neighbor, Dr. Nancy Chu, has just been fired as director of IBM’s Silicon Valley lab. She retreats down the coast to La Jolla to lick her wounds, moving into the home of her late ex-husband and evicting their estranged daughter in the process. Is Nancy retired? Is she a failure? She isn’t sure. Neither is Zemeckis. In search of distraction, she takes up metal detecting—only to unearth some things she’s been trying to bury.

Spanning from Amarillo, Texas, in 1977 to Joshua Tree, California, in 2012, The Daughters is a kaleidoscopic meditation on family, memory, and the invisible forces that bind us. Narrated by Zemeckis, the novel interweaves small-town rodeos with amateur radios, teen angst with parental love. Shard by shard, Zemeckis pieces together the story of a fractured family struggling to reassemble itself, all the while wondering whether he will have a role to play.

Like particles, these characters are small and singular, yet their stories ripple like waves—colliding, refracting, and reshaping one another across generations. Elegant, intricate, and deeply moving, The Daughters reverberates long after it ends.