By Ashley Audrain
Secrets unravel across four suburban families.
Subject
Themes
On a street in an affluent urban neighbourhood, four families occupy houses within sight of each other, their lives arranged around the performance of domesticity and the careful management of what they let show. A ten-year-old boy named Xavier falls from his third-floor bedroom window in the middle of a Wednesday night in June. The next two days unfold across the perspectives of the women who live nearest to him, each carrying a secret that the fall begins to dislodge.
On a street in an affluent urban neighbourhood, four families occupy houses within sight of each other, their lives arranged around the performance of domesticity and the careful management of what they let show. A ten-year-old boy named Xavier falls from his third-floor bedroom window in the middle…
Published in 2023, The Whispers arrived as Ashley Audrain's second novel following the international success of The Push, which established her as a singular voice in the emerging genre sometimes called maternal noir: fiction that takes the psychological experience of motherhood as its primary…
Blair Parks keeps a corner of condom foil wrapper in her kitchen drawer. Every morning she opens the drawer, places the square in her palm, and wonders. The wrapper could be from a granola bar. A mint from a business lunch. She has constructed a list of alternatives and she runs through them…
Whitney is in Blair's living room, wine in hand, talking about her mother's bus ticket. Her mother kept it hidden in her coat pocket for years, the novel tells us: a ticket to the national terminal three hours away, no expiration, good for any weekday. She never used it. Whitney wonders aloud…
Whitney sits at Xavier's bedside and counts his days: 3,680. She whispers the number like a prayer. She traces his name in the fine hairs on his forearm. She cannot remember how his laughter sounds. This last detail, small and specific, is the novel's most precise articulation of what chronic guilt…
The women on Harlow Street know each other through proximity rather than through chosen closeness, and the novel is acutely interested in what that distinction produces. Blair can see straight through the Loverlys' house from her own living room. She knows what Jacob orders on pizza nights. She…
On the night Xavier falls, police officers arrive at the hospital and Rebecca waves them away with a glance and a sympathetic look at the nurse. The officers nod and walk down the hall. They will come back later. It is fine. It can wait. This is a transaction completed without words, and it relies…
Whitney Loverly is a forty-year-old executive who built a consulting firm from nothing over seven years, driven by a ferocious determination never to be ordinary. She grew up poor, with a father whose hip pain and resentment filled their apartment, and a mother who kept a bus ticket hidden in her…
Blair Parks is forty years old and has not worked full-time in nearly a decade. She lives across the street from Whitney Loverly, where she can watch a version of the life she suspects she should have lived. She gave up a marketing career after Chloe was born, not because she was forced to but…
Rebecca Parry is thirty-seven, a paediatric emergency physician, and the most technically accomplished person on Harlow Street. She was raised by a single mother who documented every day of her childhood in pocket diaries, eighteen of them, delivered in a banker's box at medical school graduation.…
Mara Alvaro is eighty-two years old and has lived on Harlow Street since the 1960s, when she and her husband Albert arrived from Lisbon with the savings to build a life in North America. She was part of the first generation of Portuguese immigrants who settled this neighbourhood, brought pastéis de…
Xavier Loverly is ten years old, the oldest of Whitney's three children, and the one she has never been able to reach. He is long-faced, prone to scowling in a way that adults misread as surliness when it is simply the way he looks. He bites his nails relentlessly, which Whitney has repeatedly told…
Jacob Loverly is Whitney's husband, an art dealer and the son of two Yale humanities professors who grew up with every cultural advantage and chose not to exploit any of them financially. He has a PhD in art history and uses it to stand in the homes of extremely wealthy clients and teach them what…
Ben Parry is Rebecca's husband, a former middle school teacher who has taken a year-long contract at a tech start-up developing a homeschool app. He is tall, earnest, and instinctively warm with children in a way that is not performance. He was the favourite teacher before he left. He coaches a…
Aiden Parks is Blair's husband, a sales representative working in software security systems for financial institutions, mostly on commission. He is six foot two, gregarious, instinctively magnetic. He came into Blair's life at thirty-one carrying a broken glass shard in his open palm like a glass…
A September afternoon in an affluent urban neighbourhood introduces the women who will spend the next nine months orbiting each other's secrets. Whitney Loverly hosts a children's party in her immaculate backyard with the controlled energy of someone who has rehearsed every detail. She tracks every…
At Xavier's hospital bedside, Whitney holds her son's hand and studies his face. The tubes and machines do not distress her; she is simply relieved that he is still in the world. She traces his name in the fine hairs on his forearm, notices the raw cuticles and the healing scrape on his elbow, and…
At Xavier's bedside, Whitney counts the days of his life and reaches 3,680. She whispers the number like a prayer. A memory surfaces: his second day of life, Jacob's pure joy at the hospital, and her own compulsion to grab her phone the moment he stepped out to get groceries. She had lied when he…
Whitney gnaws the tip of Xavier's nail at his bedside and wonders what he can feel. She thinks about how boys move away from their mothers, how soon he would have stopped wanting her touch. She cannot remember how his laughter sounds and this disturbs her deeply. Her own childhood had little…
Blair and Rebecca arrive at the ICU together. Rebecca asks whether Blair has noticed anything concerning about Whitney lately. Blair says no and deflects, aware she is holding back everything she found in Whitney's house. Inside the room, Xavier is surrounded by tubes and monitors, his face swollen…
During a short rest on shift, Rebecca recounts her losses to herself. The first: a pomegranate-sized baby at eighteen weeks, wrapped in a soiled hand towel. The second came in the shower in the night; she cupped it from the toilet, buried it in the backyard at dawn with her hands still dirty, and…
Whitney wakes in the hospital chair to find Jacob's coat across from her; he has landed from London. She puts her head between her knees and dry-heaves. When he comes in and touches the back of her neck, she closes her eyes and braces for a violence she privately wants him to give her. He only wraps…
Friday morning: Aiden comes home smelling of alcohol, having not answered Blair's texts through the night. He slept on the couch. In their bedroom, Blair confronts him. He apologises for being late, claims he lost track of time at a colleague's place after the pub. She goes downstairs and checks his…
Rebecca lies on the nursery floor and feels the need to see her mother. Before driving over, she finds one of her mother's pocket diaries in her bedside drawer: tiny calendar squares filled with everything they did together across her childhood. Museum visits, abacus practice, piano exams, college…
A nurse shows Whitney how to wash Xavier with a warm cloth. Whitney cannot stay present. Her mind returns to the affair with Ben, to the nine months of managed deception: arranging Jacob's art fair trips to create time, the shed in the backyard where she and Ben went each time while Louisa and the…
Three hours into the bleed, Rebecca paces her kitchen. She shoves furniture, throws her keys across the room, braces for what her body is about to do to her again. The unfairness is unbearable. Ben has not texted or called. She goes to the window and sees Mara still on her doorstep in her nightgown.…
Blair grieves the friendship with Whitney as a kind of death while knowing her own life will barely change without it. Across the street, Jacob has opened the curtains. An audacity she has never felt before moves through her. She crosses the driveway and Jacob opens the door. He tells her about the…
Mara watches from her window and thinks about the paper airplanes. Last summer, Xavier came to her garden every Thursday morning and asked to help. He hated getting his hands dirty, so she bought him junior gardening gloves and told him Marcus had hated dirty nails too. One morning Xavier asked…
Whitney Loverly is a forty-year-old executive who built a consulting firm from nothing over seven years, driven by a ferocious determination never to be ordinary. She grew up poor, with a father whose hip pain and resentment filled their apartment, and a mother who kept a bus ticket hidden in her…
Blair Parks is forty years old and has not worked full-time in nearly a decade. She lives across the street from Whitney Loverly, where she can watch a version of the life she suspects she should have lived. She gave up a marketing career after Chloe was born, not because she was forced to but…
Rebecca Parry is thirty-seven, a paediatric emergency physician, and the most technically accomplished person on Harlow Street. She was raised by a single mother who documented every day of her childhood in pocket diaries, eighteen of them, delivered in a banker's box at medical school graduation.…
Mara Alvaro is eighty-two years old and has lived on Harlow Street since the 1960s, when she and her husband Albert arrived from Lisbon with the savings to build a life in North America. She was part of the first generation of Portuguese immigrants who settled this neighbourhood, brought pastéis de…
Xavier Loverly is ten years old, the oldest of Whitney's three children, and the one she has never been able to reach. He is long-faced, prone to scowling in a way that adults misread as surliness when it is simply the way he looks. He bites his nails relentlessly, which Whitney has repeatedly told…
Jacob Loverly is Whitney's husband, an art dealer and the son of two Yale humanities professors who grew up with every cultural advantage and chose not to exploit any of them financially. He has a PhD in art history and uses it to stand in the homes of extremely wealthy clients and teach them what…
Ben Parry is Rebecca's husband, a former middle school teacher who has taken a year-long contract at a tech start-up developing a homeschool app. He is tall, earnest, and instinctively warm with children in a way that is not performance. He was the favourite teacher before he left. He coaches a…
Aiden Parks is Blair's husband, a sales representative working in software security systems for financial institutions, mostly on commission. He is six foot two, gregarious, instinctively magnetic. He came into Blair's life at thirty-one carrying a broken glass shard in his open palm like a glass…
On a street in an affluent urban neighbourhood, four families occupy houses within sight of each other, their lives arranged around the performance of domesticity and the careful management of what they let show. A ten-year-old boy named Xavier falls from his third-floor bedroom window in the middle of a Wednesday night in June. The next two days unfold across the perspectives of the women who live nearest to him, each carrying a secret that the fall begins to dislodge.