Christine has always known.

She has known through all the years of the wrong world — the wrong size, the wrong body, the adult acting that cost something every time. She has known in the way that teddies know their babies: completely, without gaps, with a patience that does not diminish.

When she finally brings Sophia through to Symphonia — a world built to the scale of its youngest inhabitants, where sentient teddies care for the babies who are simply, fundamentally, always babies — it is not a surprise. It is a completion.

But Symphonia has its own question for Sophia. Babies here find their ultimate age, the age that was always theirs, the one they return to without effort and stop departing from. And Sophia, who has spent so long making do with approximations, is finally in a place where the truth of her is allowed to find its own level.

Tender, specific, and written with profound seriousness about the inner lives of those the world has never quite had the right words for, Symphonia is a novel about being known, and about the extraordinary ordinary life that becomes possible when you finally are.