All This Could Be Different

'An extraordinary novel, spiny and delicate, scathingly funny and wildly moving'
Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

'Sarah Thankam Mathews' prose is undeniable . . . she captures the sneaky, unsaying parts of longing'
Raven Leilani, author of Luster

'Some books are merely luminous . . . this one is iridescent'
Susan Choi, author of Trust Exercise


'This is not a story about work or precarity. I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit.'

All This Could be Different introduces us to Sneha. A recent college graduate freshly arrived in Milwaukee, she occupies her days with rote, stressful work as a young consultant for a battery production corporation. She is, as her boss reminds her, a "contractor, no benefits."

Her nights are spent ordering furniture off the internet, trying out the newfangled invention of dating apps, and avoiding confrontation with the terrifying property manager who lives below her. But the rewards are bountiful: the vertigo of young life in a new and expanding city, a budding friendship with the charismatic and freewheeling Tig, a quiet obsession with Marina, a ballet dancer who she runs into again and again, and the ability to send money by wire transfer to her parents two oceans away in India. Piece by piece she gathers and nurtures the fragments of a good life. But then the walls start to creep in...