“A beautifully rendered short novel full of twisting, complexly twined threads, a fascinating tangle of family connections that explores the parts of ourselves we inherit from our kin—and the parts of ourselves we invent.”
—Dan Chaon, author and National Book Award Finalist, Sleepwalk
Based on the author’s own upbringing, an intimate, riveting novel that challenges conventional understandings of love, fidelity, and betrayal
In LIKENESS (University of Iowa Press, Paperback Original, July, 29 2025), Samsun Knight’s second novel, the author skillfully weaves a story of a long-term open marriage—and its compromises, justifications, joys, and hurts—from two perspectives. For the first half of the novel, we see this polyamorous relationship through the eyes of the wife, Anne. In the second half, we continue to follow its progression through the journals of the “other woman,” Sandy. Gradually, we come to understand both women’s changes of heart and shifts in mindset—toward each other, their arrangement, and Sebastian, the man they love—after they each become pregnant within days of one another by the same man. Drawing insights from his own unconventional family, Knight deftly captures the drama of domesticity, the half-truths we tell ourselves about happily ever after, and the price of what we leave out.
Knight opens LIKENESS with Anne meeting Sebastian in the 1980s. Sebastian, newly separated from his first wife after learning that one of his children wasn’t biologically his, doesn’t believe in “closed love” anymore, something he makes clear to Anne when they begin their relationship. He promises to always be honest with Anne about his seeing other women. Anne replies that it doesn’t bother her, because at that point in their relationship, it doesn’t.
But a few months later, Anne and Sebastian are sharing a coffee when she notices a woman sitting one table over, reading the same novel; and Sebastian, following her gaze, recognizes the woman and introduces them. Anne realizes belatedly that he must be sleeping with her. But despite feeling a surge of reflexive jealousy, Anne continues her relationship with him, reminding herself that bumping into other lovers is just fine print on a contract she’s already signed.
Four and a half years later, Anne is now married to Sebastian and two months pregnant when he tells her: his lover, Sandy, is also pregnant with his child. In a flash, Anne remembers the afternoon in the coffee shop when she saw the woman at the next table, with brown hair that glowed gold in the sunlight. The possibility of children outside of their relationship had never been explicitly negotiated between them; she’d never imagined it would have to be. The next morning, Anne leaves to stay with her mother while she tries to decide whether to burn her marriage down to ashes, and whether to carry the baby to term.
In part two of LIKENESS, Sandy’s journal entries offer a wholly different perspective on this open marriage. Spanning two months at the beginning of 1991, we get an up-close and personal look at Sandy’s everyday life as the overwhelmed single mother of an infant, and also a self-assured woman with a markedly different experience of love beyond monogamy. In between grocery shopping lists and seances with the dead, Sandy tries to assert herself in her relationship as the “outside partner” and demands more help from Sebastian, but finds herself indirectly negotiating with Anne instead, and essentially abandoned. Leaning on her friends, her father, and her wavering faith in the world, she works to find a way to remake her life on her own terms.
Told by two women who share many of the same longings and misapprehensions, and make many of the same mistakes, LIKENESS is a story about love in real life, with all its messiness, surprises, and trade-offs.
About the Author
SAMSUN KNIGHT is a writer and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. Likeness is his second novel.
In his other life, he is an assistant professor at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and a faculty affiliate at the University of Toronto School of Cities, where he studies quantitative marketing, optimal targeting, and machine learning.
LIKENESS
By Samsun Knight
University of Iowa Press
Paperback Original published on July 29, 2025, $18.00, 128 pages
ISBN: 978-1685970208
Extraordinary Advance Praise for
LIKENESS
By Samsun Knight
“Reading Likeness, I couldn’t help marveling at how well Samsun Knight knows Anne, Sebastian, and Sandy, and how deftly he delineates their many changes of heart. He has an exquisite gift for capturing those moments when a character reaches the edge of their known feelings and steps into terra incognita. The result is a wonderfully suspenseful and deeply pleasurable novel.”
—Margot Livesey, author, The Flight of Gemma Hardy
“Samsun Knight’s Likeness is a beautifully rendered short novel full of twisting, complexly twined threads, a fascinating tangle of family connections that explores the parts of ourselves we inherit from our kin—and the parts of ourselves we invent. Knight is a remarkable writer.”
—Dan Chaon, author and National Book Award Finalist, Sleepwalk
“Likeness is propulsive, hilarious, moving, and profound. It’s also a page-turner about a love triangle and the challenges of finding a stable, if unconventional, relationship. Even more than that, it’s about how hard it is to articulate what we really want from love, parenthood, or even life in general.”
—Maria Kuznetsova, author, Something Unbelievable
“Knight rearranges and refracts what we thought we knew of the domestic drama and gives it new shape. Likeness shimmers like a house of mirrors with its continuously distorting understandings of what love is supposed to be. Tender, infuriating, redeeming, and graceful. I devoured it.”
—Eskor David Johnson, author, Pay As You Go
“David Foster Wallace once said his tastes in reading turned toward the realistic because most experimental stuff was hellaciously unfun to read. The genius of Likeness is to pair experiment with realism, asking really fun questions of old forms, delivering both the story of love and a slant and sly look at how we tell those stories. The power-to-weight ratio here is perfect. Everything’s up for negotiation: monogamy, fidelity, marriage, babies. How do we come to know each other, how do we gather and bind, how do we deepen and endure and go on, what arrangements are we making for love? It’s said that happy love has no history, but Likeness, in its brief and brilliant moment, is a joy to read, and that’s plenty.”
—Charles D’Ambrosio, author, The Dead Fish Museum
—Dan Chaon, author and National Book Award Finalist, Sleepwalk
Based on the author’s own upbringing, an intimate, riveting novel that challenges conventional understandings of love, fidelity, and betrayal
In LIKENESS (University of Iowa Press, Paperback Original, July, 29 2025), Samsun Knight’s second novel, the author skillfully weaves a story of a long-term open marriage—and its compromises, justifications, joys, and hurts—from two perspectives. For the first half of the novel, we see this polyamorous relationship through the eyes of the wife, Anne. In the second half, we continue to follow its progression through the journals of the “other woman,” Sandy. Gradually, we come to understand both women’s changes of heart and shifts in mindset—toward each other, their arrangement, and Sebastian, the man they love—after they each become pregnant within days of one another by the same man. Drawing insights from his own unconventional family, Knight deftly captures the drama of domesticity, the half-truths we tell ourselves about happily ever after, and the price of what we leave out.
Knight opens LIKENESS with Anne meeting Sebastian in the 1980s. Sebastian, newly separated from his first wife after learning that one of his children wasn’t biologically his, doesn’t believe in “closed love” anymore, something he makes clear to Anne when they begin their relationship. He promises to always be honest with Anne about his seeing other women. Anne replies that it doesn’t bother her, because at that point in their relationship, it doesn’t.
But a few months later, Anne and Sebastian are sharing a coffee when she notices a woman sitting one table over, reading the same novel; and Sebastian, following her gaze, recognizes the woman and introduces them. Anne realizes belatedly that he must be sleeping with her. But despite feeling a surge of reflexive jealousy, Anne continues her relationship with him, reminding herself that bumping into other lovers is just fine print on a contract she’s already signed.
Four and a half years later, Anne is now married to Sebastian and two months pregnant when he tells her: his lover, Sandy, is also pregnant with his child. In a flash, Anne remembers the afternoon in the coffee shop when she saw the woman at the next table, with brown hair that glowed gold in the sunlight. The possibility of children outside of their relationship had never been explicitly negotiated between them; she’d never imagined it would have to be. The next morning, Anne leaves to stay with her mother while she tries to decide whether to burn her marriage down to ashes, and whether to carry the baby to term.
In part two of LIKENESS, Sandy’s journal entries offer a wholly different perspective on this open marriage. Spanning two months at the beginning of 1991, we get an up-close and personal look at Sandy’s everyday life as the overwhelmed single mother of an infant, and also a self-assured woman with a markedly different experience of love beyond monogamy. In between grocery shopping lists and seances with the dead, Sandy tries to assert herself in her relationship as the “outside partner” and demands more help from Sebastian, but finds herself indirectly negotiating with Anne instead, and essentially abandoned. Leaning on her friends, her father, and her wavering faith in the world, she works to find a way to remake her life on her own terms.
Told by two women who share many of the same longings and misapprehensions, and make many of the same mistakes, LIKENESS is a story about love in real life, with all its messiness, surprises, and trade-offs.
About the Author
SAMSUN KNIGHT is a writer and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. Likeness is his second novel.
In his other life, he is an assistant professor at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and a faculty affiliate at the University of Toronto School of Cities, where he studies quantitative marketing, optimal targeting, and machine learning.
LIKENESS
By Samsun Knight
University of Iowa Press
Paperback Original published on July 29, 2025, $18.00, 128 pages
ISBN: 978-1685970208
Extraordinary Advance Praise for
LIKENESS
By Samsun Knight
“Reading Likeness, I couldn’t help marveling at how well Samsun Knight knows Anne, Sebastian, and Sandy, and how deftly he delineates their many changes of heart. He has an exquisite gift for capturing those moments when a character reaches the edge of their known feelings and steps into terra incognita. The result is a wonderfully suspenseful and deeply pleasurable novel.”
—Margot Livesey, author, The Flight of Gemma Hardy
“Samsun Knight’s Likeness is a beautifully rendered short novel full of twisting, complexly twined threads, a fascinating tangle of family connections that explores the parts of ourselves we inherit from our kin—and the parts of ourselves we invent. Knight is a remarkable writer.”
—Dan Chaon, author and National Book Award Finalist, Sleepwalk
“Likeness is propulsive, hilarious, moving, and profound. It’s also a page-turner about a love triangle and the challenges of finding a stable, if unconventional, relationship. Even more than that, it’s about how hard it is to articulate what we really want from love, parenthood, or even life in general.”
—Maria Kuznetsova, author, Something Unbelievable
“Knight rearranges and refracts what we thought we knew of the domestic drama and gives it new shape. Likeness shimmers like a house of mirrors with its continuously distorting understandings of what love is supposed to be. Tender, infuriating, redeeming, and graceful. I devoured it.”
—Eskor David Johnson, author, Pay As You Go
“David Foster Wallace once said his tastes in reading turned toward the realistic because most experimental stuff was hellaciously unfun to read. The genius of Likeness is to pair experiment with realism, asking really fun questions of old forms, delivering both the story of love and a slant and sly look at how we tell those stories. The power-to-weight ratio here is perfect. Everything’s up for negotiation: monogamy, fidelity, marriage, babies. How do we come to know each other, how do we gather and bind, how do we deepen and endure and go on, what arrangements are we making for love? It’s said that happy love has no history, but Likeness, in its brief and brilliant moment, is a joy to read, and that’s plenty.”
—Charles D’Ambrosio, author, The Dead Fish Museum
