Author Description

A person's fortune or misfortune can always be traced back to their family. For Lily, graduating from Stanford on a blistering May afternoon should have marked the beginning of freedom. Instead, it exposes the invisible threads that bind her-to her ambitious brother Levi, to her proud yet insecure father Eric, and to a family past whose weight refuses to loosen its grip. As Lily clutches her diploma and scans the crowd for Levi, Eric is reliving his own sense of inadequacy-bumping into a former student turned entrepreneur whose future seems brighter than his own. Meanwhile, Levi, straddling the worlds of family and ambition, rushes between his sister's milestone and the demands of the stage, where the artist he manages teeters between chaos and genius. From a sun-soaked lawn at Stanford to the dark, pulsing clubs of San Francisco, Solitude and Freedom Book One reveals how celebrations quickly splinter into isolation, and how the bonds of kinship-tense, unspoken, and often unbalanced-shape the course of each life. What begins with a graduation unfolds into a meditation on family rivalry, fragile pride, and the uneasy balance between belonging and escape.