Elsa is a primatologist who has spent her life making herself legible to a world that was never built for her. Brilliant, Latinx, and autistic, she has hidden her truth even from herself; she finds it easier to communicate with Wookie, a young female orangutan, than with the humans who surround her. When her research brings her back into the orbit of her ex-boyfriend Jason, her cousin Miri, and Miri's nonverbal teenage son AJ, the careful boundaries Elsa has constructed between science and feeling begin to dissolve.
Warm, funny, and deeply moving, Sapience asks what it truly means to communicate and whether love requires speech at all.