New York City

New York City is the overarching setting for the entirety of the novel. Hazel grows up here with her parents, Erwin and Sarah, in a Manhattan apartment called the Apelles. Years later, she inherits the apartment and lives here alone after her husband Vik's passing.

All of the other characters in the novel also live in New York City. Many of them are simultaneously enamored by and tired of the metropolis's culture. People are everywhere, yet no one seems truly connected. The city is a place to hide, not a place to connect with others.

On a winter night in 1978, New York is drowned in a cataclysmic blizzard, that renders the city nearly unrecognizable.

The Apelles

The Apelles is another of the novel's primary settings. It is the apartment building in Manhattan where Hazel lives with her parents as a child, and by herself as an...