You Are One of Them
About this audiobook
Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, DC, in the politically charged 1980s. Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family to return to his native England; her agoraphobic mother is obsessed with fears of nuclear war. Jenny is an all-American girl who has seemingly perfect parents. With Cold War rhetoric reaching a fever pitch in 1982, the ten-year-old girls write letters to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov asking for peace. But only Jenny's letter receives a response, and Sarah is left behind when her friend accepts the Kremlin's invitation to visit the USSR and becomes an international media sensation. The girls' icy relationship still hasn't thawed when Jenny and her parents die tragically in a plane crash in 1985.
Ten years later, Sarah is about to graduate from college when she receives a mysterious letter from Moscow suggesting that Jenny's death might have been a hoax. She sets off to the former Soviet Union in search of the truth, but the more she delves into her personal Cold War history, the harder it is to separate fact from propaganda.
You Are One of Them is a taut, moving debut about the ways in which we define ourselves against others and the secrets we keep from those who are closest to us. In this insightful forensic of a mourned friendship, Holt illuminates the long-lasting sting of abandonment and the measures we take to bring back those we have lost.
About the author
Elliott Holt ’s short fiction has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Guernica, and Bellevue Literary Review. She won a 2011 Pushcart Prize and was the runner-up for the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award. A graduate of the MFA program at Brooklyn College, where she won the Himan Brown Award, Holt has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop, and Yaddo. She is a former contributing editor at One Story magazine and a former copywriter, having worked at advertising agencies in Moscow, London, and New York. She currently resides in her hometown of Washington, DC.
Cassandra Campbell is a prolific audiobook narrator with more than 700 titles to her credit. A 2018 inductee in Audible’s inaugural Narrator Hall of Fame, she has won four Audie Awards, has been nominated for a dozen more, and has consistently been an AudioFile Magazine Best Narrator as well as a Publisher’s Weekly Best Narrator of the Year. She has also performed in and directed dozens of plays at theaters across the country.
