Publication Date: June 24, 2025
From the author of Summer Hours at the Robbers Library, a tenderhearted story of two very different women grappling with the messy emotional legacies passed down by their parents—for fans of Dani Shapiro, Ann Napolitano, and Jody Picoult.
It’s the perennial question: are we a product of how we were raised, or is our identity hardwired by our genetic inheritance? When her adoptive mother dies in a freak accident, high school senior Melody Marcus doubles down on her refusal to learn anything about her birth parents. In this age of 23&me, though, that may not be possible, and the secrets hidden in her DNA threaten to upend everything she knows about herself and her family.
For Candace Milton, a successful woman in her forties, the collateral damage from her parents’ tortured marriage has led to a life of intentional unattachment. She is happy—enough. But a chance encounter with a friend of Melody’s father will challenge this assumption and force her to reimagine who she is and who she might become.
Big-hearted evocative, and achingly relatable, What We Leave Behind grapples with destiny, belonging, and love, and makes us question our own idea of family: the kind we’re born into and the kind we create.
Sue Halpern’s newest novel, What We Leave Behind, tells the separate stories of Melody Marcus, a 17-year-old suburban high school senior, and Candace Milton, an HR executive who lives alone and commutes from Connecticut.
Melody’s life seems ordinary, finishing high school and going through the motions of preparing for college while being doted on by her adoptive parents. Her best friend, Lily, a few years older and also adopted, keeps in touch while she is away at college. There aren’t many surprises in Melody’s life until her mother is killed in a freak accident. Now, her father is adrift in his grief, and Melody is left to grasp at support. In her anger and confusion, she pushes the conventions of senior year aside and begins to consider a new path after graduation.
Candace Milton trades her workdays filled with city energy and is happy with her evenings and days of solitude in Connecticut, except for when her best friend Paul forces her social boundaries. It is Paul who brings new people into Candace’s world during a fateful Thanksgiving. Eventually, the broadening of her friendships brings Candace and Melody’s paths to cross.
Both women have lives that are easy to identify with, but the tension in the novel builds slowly. The ending is quite surprising and may make the wait feel worth it.
Sue Halpern’s familial drama, What We Leave Behind, begins and ends with unexpected twists. 
Sue Halpern is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Summer Hours at the Robbers Library. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, and Condé Nast Traveler. A former New Yorker staff writer, she lives Vermont with her husband, the writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben, and is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College.
