The Whispers

Ashley Audrain is a Canadian writer whose first novel, The Push, debuted in 2021. Her sophomore novel The Whispers, published in 2023, is a twisty psychological thriller with a particular focus on the Sacrifices of Motherhood, marital relationships, Female Rivalry and friendship, and the Effects of Willful Ignorance. The protagonist of The Push, first-time mom Blythe, experiences anxiety over society’s expectations of mothers and how her own lived reality differs from them. Similar tensions plague the four main characters in The Whispers: Blair, Whitney, Rebecca, and Mara. Audrain explains that she got the idea for the novel after hearing Gayle King on Oprah’s podcast: King described being a busy mother and journalist who one day discovered that her husband was having an affair. Oprah challenged King’s contention that she had no idea of her husband’s infidelity, asking if there wasn’t “some sort of whisper of something going wrong in [King’s] marriage” (“Ashley Audrain on Her Latest Thriller Novel, ‘The Whispers.’” Global News, 6 June 2023). This way of describing intuition becomes a motif in The Whispers, whose characters similarly suppress their misgivings to maintain the