An Apple Books Best Book of March
An Apple Books Favorite Debut for March
A National Bestseller
A Great Group Reads of 2025 from the Womens National Book Association
Library Journal Best Book of 2025

A girl takes on a series of identities to survive, shrouding herself in layers of secrets, until years later when she is forced to reckon with her past.

On an ordinary day in an upscale Atlanta suburb, Maya is making breakfast for her two sons, when her husband drops a letter on the counter and asks a devastating question: Who is Sunny?

As she frantically weighs the impact of the truth on her future, Maya relives the details of her childhood journey to America from Guyanaand the traumatic events that forced her to leave her past behind. Through the eyes of Mayas innocent and scared younger self, we discover the power of hope, empathy, and the possibility of beginning again.

A powerful reckoning over the people we might have been if wed chosen a different path, from a master of the short story

In this stirring, reflective collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates ponders alternate destinies: the other lives we might have led if wed made different choices. An accomplished writer returns to her childhood home of Yewville, but the homecoming stirs troubled thoughts about the person she might have been if shed never left. A man in prison contemplates the gravity of his irreversible act. A students affair with a professor results in a pregnancy that alters the course of her life forever. Even the experience of reading is investigated as one that can create a profound transformation: You could enter another time, the time of the book.

The (Other) You is an arresting and incisive vision into these alternative realities, a collection that ponders the constraints we all face given the circumstances of our birth and our temperaments, and that examines the competing pressures and expectations on women in particular. Finely attuned to the nuances of our social and psychic selves, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates here why she remains one of our most celebrated and relevant literary figures.