City of Laughter

<p><b>A rich and riveting debut spanning four generations of Eastern European Jewish women bound by blood, half-hidden secrets and the fantastical visitation of a shapeshifting stranger over the course of 100 years.</b><br><br><i>The City of Laughter</i> follows a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets back to her family''s origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.<br><br>Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th-century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger - bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century.<br><br>In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother,