All This Could Be Different
By Sarah Thankam Matthews
Viking, August 2, 2022
From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself — a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in 21st century America
Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She’s moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: She can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women — soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach.
But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It’s then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.
A beautiful and capacious novel rendered in singular, unforgettable prose, All This Could Be Different is a wise, tender, and riveting group portrait of young people forging love and community amidst struggle, and a moving story of one immigrant’s journey to make her home in the world.
Selected Praise
“All This Could Be Different is an extraordinary novel, spiny and delicate, scathingly funny and wildly moving. Sarah Thankam Mathews is a brilliant writer, one whose every ringing sentence holds both bite and heart.” —Lauren Groff, author of Matrix
About the Author
Sarah Thankam Matthews grew up between Oman and India, immigrating to the United States at seventeen. Organizes sometimes. Thankam: thun like thunder, gum like gumdrop. Recently a Rona Jaffe Fellow in fiction at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and a Margins Fellow at The Asian American Writers Workshop. Work in Best American Short Stories 2020, edited by Curtis Sittenfeld and Heidi Pitlor. Novel All This Could Be Different forthcoming from Viking and W&N in August 2022.