What does it mean to keep speaking to someone who can no longer hear? Brother Epistles: A Sister's Memoir (Split/Lip, 2026) does just that. At its core, the book is an extended address from Shanda McManus—a physician, writer and healthcare advocate—writing to her brother, Monir, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in Philadelphia in 1992. He was 20 years old.

What unfolds is a memoir of grief, race, memory, family history and survival, but also something more structurally intimate: a sustained act of speaking across absence. Each section begins the same way, in cursive—Dear Monir—a visual and textual return that reinforces the ongoing nature of the relationship. The form itself refuses finality.