At 23, Alice Hare leaves England for New York - the city of her birth, before she was adopted by a British mother and an American father. As she falls in love with the big city, she also becomes fixated on Mizuko Himura, an intriguing Japanese writer living in New York whose life has strange parallels with her own. Their 'chance' encounter and subsequent relationship expose a dark tangle of lies and sexual encounters as three families across the globe collide, and the most ancient of questions - where do we come from? - can be answered just by searching online.

Sympathy is a brilliant and deeply moving take on personal accountability, blood ties, and our tormented efforts to connect in the digital age. It examines how we relate to each other and the world around us in an age of hyperconnectivity and algorithms.