From the Publisher
[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
“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, “Summer’s 11 Hottest Thrillers”
“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, “Summer’s Best Books”
“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
“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.” — People, “The Best New Books”
“An absorbing view of a family, with the emphasis on the mother-daughter connection, in which—flaws aside—love shines through.” — Booklist (starred review)
“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, author of My Husband’s Wife and Blood Sisters
PRAISE FOR ELIZABETH IS MISSING: — :
“[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
“Spellbinding.” — New York Times Book Review
“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, author of Room
“Part mystery, part meditation on memory, part Dickensian revelation of how apparent charity may hurt its recipients, this is altogether brilliant.” — Booklist (starred review)
“A poignant novel of loss.” — Kirkus Reviews
“British author Healey draws on her own grandmothers’ experiences to create the distinctive narrator of her first novel… an absorbing tale.” — Publishers Weekly
“Bold, touching and hugely memorable.” — Sunday Times (London)
“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
Booklist (starred review)
An absorbing view of a family, with the emphasis on the mother-daughter connection, in which—flaws aside—love shines through.
:
PRAISE FOR ELIZABETH IS MISSING:
The New Yorker
[An] absorbing thriller. . . . Healey writes movingly about motherly love, and the pain that comes when you can’t protect your own, even from themselves.
Wall Street Journal
[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.
Family Circle
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.
Entertainment Weekly
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.
Bustle
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.
“The Best New Books” People
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.”
Jane Corry
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.”
New York Times Book Review
Spellbinding.
Wall Street Journal
[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.
The New Yorker
[An] absorbing thriller. . . . Healey writes movingly about motherly love, and the pain that comes when you can’t protect your own, even from themselves.
Sunday Times (London)
Bold, touching and hugely memorable.
BookPage
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.
Emma Donoghue
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.
Kimberly McCreight
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.
Claire Fuller
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.”
Margot Livesey
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.
Washington Independent Review of Books
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.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
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.
The Guardian
[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.
Emma Donogue
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.
New York Journal of Books
A compelling read, Elizabeth is Missing offers added depth of mystery and suspense along with aptly portraying a family trying to cope with illness.
The Observer (London)
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.
Kirkus Reviews
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.
