No matter how much the protagonist of Lihi Lapid’s new novel, hiding in a Tel Aviv staircase and disguising her identity, seems to be on her own, she never really is.

After all, women’s lives are tangles of daughters and mothers, grandmothers and memories from which it isn’t so easy to escape.

Although she runs away from home after her mother bars her from seeing an older man and winds up scared and alone, Nina doesn’t remain isolated; she finds a home with a lonely widow struggling both with her own familial pain and memory loss who mistakes Nina for her long-lost granddaughter.

Shifting points of view from Nina to her mother, a Russian immigrant bereft because she let her daughter down, to the widow’s son in America, On Her Own takes readers on a tense, immersive journey to a reminder that love springs up in the most unlikely places.

Lihi Lapid is a bestselling Israeli author, photojournalist, columnist, and activist who is married to the former prime minister of Israel, the current leader of the opposition. This is her third novel.