Larissa MacFarquhar is a staff writer for The New Yorker. She will study pairs of siblings from three American families in which one sibling chose to move away from his or her hometown, and the other chose to stay. Her book will follow their lives, tracing the way that their original decisions bound them to, or led them away from, the places where they started. She will also explore how these siblings’ separations shaped their values, class, and politics both in their later years and for subsequent generations.