What follows is the unravelling of four families on this street, as they try to understand what happened that night, and what secrets are being kept between friends and neighbours, ones that connect them all in ways they don’t know.Įxploring envy, women’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that marks Audrain as a major women’s fiction talent.

The women of the neighborhood all grapple with events leading up to that night. Later on that same child falls from his window. And then, his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where she refuses to speak to anyone, including her best friend who lives across the street. The Whispers by Ashley Audrain In a well-off suburban neighborhood, the neighbors overhead Whitney snap at her child. Soon after, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack-loud and clear. On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighborhood couples and their children gather for a catered barbecue as the summer winds down drinks continue late into the night.Įverything is fabulous until the picture-perfect hostess explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. (Forget the men, who are given no inner lives.) This is Audrains second novel about troubled children and their troubled mothers, following The Push (2021). Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Family RemainsĪ propulsive page-turner about four families whose lives are changed when the unthinkable happens-and what is lost when we give in to our own worst impulses “Spellbinding, shimmering, visceral…Ashley Audrain is in a league of her own.”

The whispers a novel ashley audrain