Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels. In Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (Penguin Random House), she confronts a staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history–the life she had lived–crumbled beneath her. Inheritance is a book about the extraordinary time in which we live, a time in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.
Ruth Franklin, in The New York Times Book Review, found Inheritance “Profound… The true drama of Inheritance is not Shapiro’s discovery of her father’s identity but the meaning she makes of it […]Shapiro’s account is beautifully written and deeply moving — it brought me to tears more than once.”