Whistle in the Dark: A Novel

by Emma Healey

Overview

Emma Healey follows the success of her #1 internationally bestselling debut novel Elizabeth Is Missing, winner of the Costa First Novel Award, with this beautiful, thought-provoking, and psychologically complex tale that affirms her status as one of the most inventive and original literary novelists today.

Jen and Hugh Maddox have just survived every parent’s worst nightmare.

Relieved, but still terrified, they sit by the hospital bedside of their fifteen-year-old daughter, Lana, who was found bloodied, bruised, and disoriented after going missing for four days during a mother-daughter vacation in the country. As Lana lies mute in the bed, unwilling or unable to articulate what happened to her during that period, the national media speculates wildly and Jen and Hugh try to answer many questions.

Where was Lana? How did she get hurt? Was the teenage boy who befriended her involved? How did she survive outside for all those days? Even when she returns to the family home and her school routine, Lana only provides the same frustrating answer over and over: "I can’t remember."

For years, Jen had tried to soothe the depressive demons plaguing her younger child, and had always dreaded the worst. Now she has hope—the family has gone through hell and come out the other side. But Jen cannot let go of her need to find the truth. Without telling Hugh or their pregnant older daughter Meg, Jen sets off to retrace Lana’s steps, a journey that will lead her to a deeper understanding of her youngest daughter, her family, and herself.

A wry, poignant, and masterfully drawn story that explores the bonds and duress of family life, the pain of mental illness, and the fraught yet enduring connection between mothers and daughters, Whistle in the Dark is a story of guilt, fear, hope, and love that explores what it means to lose and find ourselves and those we love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062309716
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	07/24/2018
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	417,647
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Emma Healey holds a degree in bookbinding and an MA in creative writing. Elizabeth Is Missing is her first novel. She lives in the United Kingdom.

Editorial Reviews

Ingeniously structured and remarkably poignant, Elizabeth is Missing is a riveting story of friendship and loss that will have you compulsively puzzling fact from fiction as you race to the last page. Immersed in the narrator’s increasingly fragmented world, the story questions the true meaning of memory and proves the enduring power of love.

Kimberly McCreight

Elizabeth Is Missing is every bit as compelling as the...hype suggests.... The novel is both a gripping detective yarn and a haunting depiction of mental illness, but also more poignant and blackly comic than you might expect.

The Observer (London)

A compelling read, Elizabeth is Missing offers added depth of mystery and suspense along with aptly portraying a family trying to cope with illness.

New York Journal of Books

Elizabeth is Missing will stir and shake you: an investigation into a seventy-year-old crime, through the eyes of the most likeably unreliable of narrators. But the real mystery at its compassionate core is the fragmentation of the human mind.

Emma Donogue

[A] finely drawn mother/daughter pairing and sharp take on the nitty-gritty of contemporary familial relationships. . . . The desperate love of a parent for a child they cannot know is wonderfully true to life, and despite the rather bleak set-up, there are a lot of very funny moments. . . . both cathartic and satisfying.

The Guardian

Healey’s skill as a writer is laudable for the way she manipulates the English language so that words and the meanings attached to them suddenly become slippery.. . .. Furthermore, Healey shows how words hold an odd magic, sometimes a sinister power.  . .. .  Whistle in the Dark is not to be missed.

Washington Independent Review of Books

Gripping . . . . Healey makes ‘Whistle’ fresh and surprising by connecting Lana’s recovery from the trauma of her disappearance to the painful reckoning of her mother, Jen, who is equally lost. . . . Fans of Celeste Ng or of Healey’s observant debut, ‘Elizabeth Is Missing’, in which an elderly woman with dementia keeps insisting that something sinister has happened to her absent friend, will recognize the new novel’s DNA. Like her first book, ‘Whistle’ is a hybrid of psychological thriller and domestic drama with a protagonist whose viewpoint is unreliable and a set of mothers and daughters whose relationships feel complicated and real.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

The true mystery of this captivating novel begins not so much when Lana is lost but when she’s found, cold, pale, her head bloody, her clothes soaked. Faced with her daughter’s silence, Jen embarks on her own perilous journey to understanding. With masterful skill and mounting suspense, Healey reveals the complexities and ambiguities of family life. A brilliant and unsettling novel.

Margot Livesey

Emma Healey is a natural story-teller, and I knew from the opening page that I would be in safe hands. She expertly shows what it’s like to have a depressed teenage daughter—all the love, the worries, and frustrations were perfectly observed, while still managing to bring out the comic side of modern family life, and wrap it in a story that urged me to keep reading to find out what happened.” 

Claire Fuller

Elizabeth is Missing will stir and shake you: an investigation into a seventy-year-old crime, through the eyes of the most likeably unreliable of narrators. But the real mystery at its compassionate core is the fragmentation of the human mind.

Emma Donoghue

[A] knockout debut...Ms. Healey’s audacious conception and formidable talent combine in a bravura performance that sustains its momentum and pathos to the last.

Wall Street Journal

This is no conventional crime novel but a compelling work that crosses literary genres. Maud’s experience of dementia is harrowing at times, especially in comparison to her completely lucid moments. The two mysteries at the heart of the book, too—one experienced as a girl and the other as an elderly woman—are brilliantly handled. The result is bold, touching and hugely memorable.

Sunday Times (London)

Spellbinding.

New York Times Book Review

What’s truly astonishing about the book is that its author—a web administrator at the University of East Anglia—isn’t even 30 years old. How can she know what it’s like for a person to lose herself, bit by bit? How can her descriptions of World War II, with all the shabbiness and rationing and black-market intrigue, be so vivid? Of course, Healey is able to imagine and empathize on such a level because she’s simply a brilliant writer. Let’s hope we hear much more from her over the years.

BookPage

Altogether brilliant.

Booklist (starred review)

2018-05-01
After four agonizing days, Jen and Hugh Maddox's 15-year-old daughter, Lana, has been found, bloodied and soaking wet. But where has she been?Lana herself cannot—or will not—say. The clues are scant: While on a mother-daughter painting course in the English countryside, Lana simply vanished one night and turned up four days later, spotted by a farmer. Did Lana leave voluntarily, or was she taken? Could fellow artist Stephen, a minister of the New Lollards Fellowship, a sect fascinated by visits to hell, have taken her? Or perhaps Matthew, the son of the holiday-center manager, lured Lana away? Remembering how she caught Lana last year with a plastic bag full of painkillers, Jen fears that Lana may have intended to harm herself. After Lana is discharged from the hospital, the Maddoxes return to London and attempt to patch their family back together. Still riddled with questions, Jen begins to investigate. In short, deft narrative fragments, Healey (Elizabeth Is Missing, 2014) captures Jen's piecing together of Lana's fragile psyche. Hoping to find clues, Jen scrutinizes Lana's sketchbook, her Instagram account, and the books hidden under her bed, alarmed to find repeated references to the end of life. With echoes of Demeter's rescue of Persephone, Jen's investigation into what happened over those four days becomes a quest to understand her daughter's mental illness and accept her broken memories. Healey beautifully depicts Lana's sense of unease in her own body: When asked by her therapist to find an image that symbolically represents her discomfort, Lana chooses one of birds, explaining that she feels as if she were full of fluttering birds eager to escape her skin. Along the way, Jen must face her own psychological quirks (including possibly imaginary cats) and walk in Lana's footsteps.An exquisite portrait of a mother's healing love for her troubled daughter.

Kirkus Reviews

Gripping psychological suspense pitting a hostile teen who won’t explain herself against a mom turned detective who’ll risk even her sanity to reach her daughter.”

“The Best New Books” People

For those who like their thrillers a little more literary, this one’s for you. Healey’s follow-up to her breakout Elizabeth Is Missing promises a psychologically arresting mystery surrounding the disappearance of a 15-year-old girl. Intriguing commentary on mental illness, trauma, and family life abounds.

Entertainment Weekly

[An] absorbing thriller. . . . Healey writes movingly about motherly love, and the pain that comes when you can’t protect your own, even from themselves.

The New Yorker

You have to read Whistle in the Dark. . . . A powerful novel about shared trauma, the effects of mental health on the family, and the pressures of motherhood, this is a slow-burning and utterly unsettling domestic thriller you will have a hard time putting down.

Bustle

PRAISE FOR ELIZABETH IS MISSING:

:

I don’t know anyone else who writes like this. Emma Healey’s voice soars, sings, and startles as she takes you right under the skin of her characters. She ‘magics’ the ordinary into the extraordinary and, just as impressively, transposes the extraordinary to the ordinary. Unforgettable.”   

Jane Corry

What starts with a thrillerish seteup—missing teen—takes us to a more familiar but equally disturbing place. Trying to understand what happened to her daughter, Jen learns that we may be our own greatest fear.

Family Circle

02/15/2018
"I can't remember." That's what 15-year-old Lana says repeatedly as she lies bruised and confused in a hospital bed after having been missing for four days. Always worried about Lana's emotional seesawing, her mother quietly goes off to reconstruct Lana's lost time and discover what happened to her. Healey's No. 1 internationally best-selling debut novel, Elizabeth Is Missing, won the Costa First Novel Award.

Library Journal

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