In Touch

While promoting her debut, 26 Knots, the writer and pediatrician Bindu Suresh described a knot “as a complication in the thread of a character’s life.” Such imagery appears throughout the novel: its characters are tied inextricably to the choices they make, the people they love, and the sticky situations they create. Now, in The Road between Us, other entanglements abound. Spanning several decades, Suresh’s disparate plot lines and shifting perspectives throw a group of interconnected people in and out of one another’s orbits as they resist and capitulate to their impulses: romantic, self-destructive, and otherwise.

In the opening pages, Estela, a law clerk in Toronto, calls her former schoolmate Ash to ask a favour. Although inseparable as undergraduates at McGill, the two haven’t spoken in fourteen years. As Estela remembers fragments of their early friendship, her thoughts turn to Roman, her thesis supervisor, with whom she had an affair. “They...