Debut novelist Elliott carefully, step by step, draws together the intersecting lives of these people who have let others dictate their identities and storylines. Meanwhile, Sadie, usually obsessed with blogging and tweeting a perfect life, struggles with her own long-repressed attraction to women. Miriam and Ralph connect, listening to each other’s stories, giving each other tacit permission to cast off the shells of fake lives. Realizing that his marriage, indeed his whole post-college life, has been a sham, Ralph has simply walked away. A reluctant psychotherapist, suppressed gardener, and father to 16-year-old twins, Ralph has just discovered his wife, Sadie, kissing another woman.

At last, at the age of 35, Miriam is ready to leave the house, and her steps lead her into the woods, where she runs into Ralph. After Frances’ death and a dark encounter in the woods, the now-adult Miriam secludes herself in her home for three years, reducing her social world to best friend Fenella and Boo, a track-suited neighbor whose secret love for Miriam has led him to volunteer as her handyman. Under her abusive mother’s thumb, Miriam lost not only her voice, but also all connection to her father, her grandmother, and anyone who might have rescued her.

Humiliated and shunned by her classmates, Miriam withdrew deep inside herself, speaking only in whispers. One day, 8-year-old Miriam Delaney’s mother, Frances, showed up at her school in nothing but athletic socks.

Whispers through a megaphone