The Kinship of Strangers: A Fractional Fiction Novel
Ten strangers. One revelation. The genetic test results that connect a rabbi in Philadelphia to the groundskeeper he has never truly seen. The cognitive scientist who cannot apply her own research to herself. The genetic counselor who throws away her own ancestry kit. The archaeologist who discovers bones that belong to everyone and no one.
In conference rooms and checkpoints, in restaurants and churches, in the space between what DNA reveals and what identity requires, ten people confront the same impossible question: What happens when science proves you are kin to the people you were taught to see as other?
A rabbi discovers his Y-chromosome connects him more closely to Palestinians than to his own congregation. A Palestinian archaeologist excavates Bronze Age remains that complicate every modern claim to the land. An Israeli geneticist and a Palestinian researcher collaborate in secret, their shared data too dangerous to publish. A Jewish convert realizes her belonging will always carry an asterisk. And at a conference in Amman, strangers who have been circling the same questions finally meet.
About Fractional Fiction
Fractional Fiction is a literary series that combines classical narrative structures with contemporary scientific research. Each novel uses a public domain literary source as its structural framework while integrating findings from current scientific domains.
The Kinship of Strangers draws its structure from two public domain sources: James Joyce's Dubliners, with its linked stories building toward an earned epiphany, and the nested narratives of One Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade survives by leaving stories unfinished. Like Scheherazade, these characters have learned that the story that does not end is the story that keeps you alive. Resolution is not available. Continuation is the only victory.
The novel integrates findings from population genetics research on the Cohen Modal Haplotype, cognitive science studies on identity-protective cognition, and archaeological analyses of Bronze Age Levantine populations. The science is real. The characters are invented. The questions belong to everyone who has ever discovered that identity is more complicated than inheritance.
This is Fractional Fiction: literary narrative grounded in contemporary research, exploring how knowledge transforms us without necessarily healing us, and how the human need for story persists even when resolution remains impossible.
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