Ashley Audrain’s new book ‘The Whispers’ a razor-sharp thriller examining contemporary morality and beliefs

Early in “The Whispers,” the stunning new novel from Toronto writer Ashley Audrain, readers are introduced to some of the residents of a Harlow Street neighbourhood during an autumn barbecue. As Audrain writes, “There’s something animalistic about the way the middle-aged adults size each other up while feigning friendliness in the backyard of the most expensive house on the street.” There’s Whitney, the host, a businesswoman and mother of three. There’s Blair, mother of one, who works part-time in a toy store, but who is primarily focused on parenting. On the other side of the fence is Mara, an aging Portuguese immigrant, one of the final vestiges of the neighbourhood’s pre-gentrification history. And there’s Rebecca, who briefly visits the party on her way to work as an emergency room doctor. She and her husband are “childless, child-free, and so they have not yet been irrevocably changed.”

It’s a bit of a daunting opening, with a lot of characters and names thrown at the reader, but everything snaps quickly into focus when Whitney loses her temper with her ten-year-old son Xavier, a lapse which is witnessed by everyone at the party.

Nine months later, in June, Rebecca is on duty when a ten-year-old boy is brought into the ER: it’s Xavier, who has somehow fallen from his third-floor bedroom window. Whitney has found him nearly lifeless in the backyard, and called the ambulance. At the hospital, Whitney seems to collapse inward, installing herself at her son’s bedside as he lingers in a therapeutic coma — no one knows if he will ever awaken. Or what he will say happened to cause his fall, if or when he wakes.

Over the next three days, with seemingly the entire neighbourhood on tenterhooks, secrets will come to light, lies will be revealed, deceptions will be unfolded, all with the delicate cold grace of a scalpel sliding through flesh.

With her second novel, Audrain has taken command of what might be called the suburbs-and-secrets genre, a sphere the former publicity director of Penguin Books Canada entered with her first book, “The Push,” which was an instant bestseller. Such a description, though, is something of a disservice to Audrain’s work: “The Whispers” isn’t high concept, narrative driven fiction. Rather, it is something more akin to “The Slap,” Christos Tsiolkas’ 2008 novel, a thoughtful, character-driven examination of contemporary morality and beliefs, in this case around motherhood, family, sacrifice and uncertainty. Yes, the male characters are sometimes out of focus, or interchangeable, but this is by design: this is the story of a group of women, and readers are guided through their world through four separate and distinct experiences of it.

The result is a powerful, immersive story, with a surprising level of tension and suspense. Audrain has discovered the truth that many writers overlook: the highest stakes often seem tiny, or inconsequential, rooted in intimacy and domesticity. In “The Whispers,” words carry the force of a blow, or a blade, and secrets tick away in the shadows, like time-bombs, waiting to go off.