The Whispers

A Novel

By: Ashley Audrain

Narrated by: Jill Winternitz

Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Expertly, subtly and powerfully rendered. . . . [The Whispers] delivers a sucker-punch ending you’ll have to read twice to believe.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[An] electrifying . . . razor-sharp page-turner.”—Carley Fortune, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After

On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighbor­hood couples and their children gather for a barbecue as the summer winds down. Everything is fabulous until Whitney, the picture-perfect hostess, explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack—loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where his life hangs in the balance.

Over the course of a tense three days, the women of the neighborhood grapple with what led to that terrible night. People-pleasing Blair, Whitney’s best friend, suspects something isn’t as it seems. Rebecca, the ER doctor who helps treat Whit­ney’s son, has struggled to have a child of her own. And the all-knowing Mara, the older woman next door, watches everyone’s world unravel from her front porch.

Exploring envy, women’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that marks Ashley Audrain as a major fiction talent.

©2023 Ashley Audrain (P)2023 Viking

Critic reviews

“[A] standout work of literary suspense. . . . The novel soars via Audrain’s clever revelations of the ways her protagonists’ lives are linked in ways they never suspected. Both artful and pulse pounding, this isn’t easily shaken.”—Publishers Weekly

“An instant legend in Canadian publishing, The Push is a tough act to follow. . . . But Ashley needn’t worry—The Whispers lives up to the hype.”—Hello! Canada

“Rage unites [the women in The Whispers]—rage that is expertly, subtly and powerfully rendered by Audrain. They suffer quietly, buffeted by an undertow of anger at subtle accommodations to husbands and children. . . . Audrain is unwilling to court her readers’ sympathies, allowing her characters to be imperfect, vulnerable, furious and unrepentant. She examines their fury and presents their unvarnished emotions without passing judgment or apologizing. . . . [A]fter Audrain has lulled you into a sense of resignation over her characters’ fates, she delivers a sucker-punch ending you’ll have to read twice to believe.”—The New York Times