Release Date: January 26 2027
Size: 6×9, 310 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57869-251-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-57869-252-1
Library of Congress Control Number: tbd
Booksellers and Libraries: Order Info Here or at Ingram.

Synopsis

Forty-one-year-old Emma, who works with mice studying human behavior in a university research lab, suddenly finds herself cohabitating with her mentally ill sister Lydia, who was kicked out of her boarding care facility after multiple runaway attempts. While Emma’s husband is away on his dream voyage to the Galapagos, she uncovers what might have caused Lydia’s schizophrenic break. But when Emma’s husband returns home with additional chaos for their already strained family, will she remain the stark linchpin she’s always been? Emma battles her mixed feelings about her sister and uncertainty about the state of her marriage as her sibling, marital, and professional relationships collide. 

In this second novel by the author of Eavesdropper comes a family drama about commitment, adaptability, the importance of families, and the different forms they can take.

Praise

“In Nothing to Worry About, her ironically titled second novel, Alexandra Kivowitz, a lifelong psychotherapist, returns with another wonderfully satisfying and pertinent story. This time, instead of a 1950s New England town, her setting is the modern sprawl of suburban Los Angeles. While she addresses serious and complex subjects of family, marriage, pregnancy, and mental health, Kivowitz instinctively finds the balancing voice of comedy, particularly in her portrayals of Emma and Lydia, her sibling protagonists. Beautifully written, smart, entertaining, and deeply human, Nothing to Worry About is an all’s-well-that-ends-well tale for today.” 

–Leslie Monsour, author of Before the Forest Burns

______________________

“Alexandra Kivowitz grapples with mental health, genetic destiny, and the cycle of life in her second novel, Nothing to Worry About. She examines all sorts of love and its accordant obligations against the backdrop of present-day Los Angeles. What do adult sisters owe one another? What do parents owe their children, from before birth through adulthood? How do spouses arrange their evolving desires and responsibilities? In Kivowitz’s deft, ultimately optimistic world, bonds of romantic and familial attachments define the lives of her characters, and connection trumps detachment every time.”

–Elizabeth Topp, author of Perfectly Impossible and City People

______________________

“Through sisters Emma and Lydia, Kivowitz rotates a mental-health kaleidoscope—bits and pieces, colors and shapes, sharp edges across months, across oceans, from Southern California to the Galapagos, from lab rats to blue-footed boobies, from group homes to suicide. Genetic or generational? What is possible or probable? What is family? Kivowitz brings her decades of work as a psychologist to this family. Is there really ‘nothing to worry about’?”

–Eve Hoffman, author of Memory and Complicity and Red Clay

______________________

“Blending humor, scientific knowledge, and a profound understanding of people’s motivations, Nothing to Worry About tells the story of a forty-year-old woman besieged on many fronts. Was her sibling’s schizophrenia inevitably passed down in their familial gene pool? Is her husband’s wanderlust merely a desire to travel, or is it indicative of something deeper and more worrisome? Nothing to Worry About presents us with an incisive, often funny depiction of Los Angeles today, and of both ‘normal’ family problems and unusual crises in relationships. Sharply observed and well written, this book has a wonderfully satisfying ending.”

–Joan G. Gurfield, author of award-winning short stories and the upcoming novel Acts of War 

Meet the Author

Originally from New England, Alexandra Kivowitz, PhD, was a psychotherapist in Southern California who authored Eavesdropper (2025) and Nothing to Worry About, her second novel. She passed away in March 2026.