A story about the ties that bind us, Close-Up explores what makes, drives, complicates, and undermines our most important relationships.

In this artful, expansive novel, we follow five protagonists—Jacob, Martin, Caroline, Jeanie, and Jill—through love, marriage, parenthood, and the romance of friendship as they struggle to make sense of themselves and each other and of what makes for good art, good magic, and a good life. What follows is a story only Michelle Herman could write: one of missed connections and old grievances, of loneliness and longing, of rifts and reconciliations and redemption. Close-Up depicts the fraught entanglements of the relationships we’re born into and those we choose—carefully or with abandon—with the precision and nuance that has characterized her work over the last thirty years.