Rivals since their earliest youth, Marie Brenner and her brother, Carl, rarely found common ground. Like many brothers and sisters, they maintained a lifelong connection that was both aggravating and essential, navigating around the fact that they had settled in distinctly different corners of America. She had become a bestselling author and renowned journalist, at home among the left-leaning Manhattan intelligentsia he despised. He divided his time between their family’s genteel neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas, and his apple orchards in Washington State. She reveled in the history of their Jewish ancestry; he started attending a church. She was addicted to questions, probing for answers. He lived entrenched in suspicion and generalization. Then, after they had spent decades in opposition, a crisis forced them to unite. Charting their course as they waded through years of simmering angst, Apples & Oranges is ultimately the story of an uncanny reconciliation and a bittersweet confrontation between the uncertain future and the ghosts of the past.