Featured on The TV Book Club on More4 on 15 August 2010.
April 2010 Debut of the Month.
A tense tale of two 7-year old girls disappearing, it is believed together ….. but each, suffering terribly, has been taken separately for different reasons. The girls are best friends and one, Callie, has selective mutism, the other, Petra, acted as her mouthpiece. How the two are found and the dramatic events that follow are compulsively related in a terrific read.
It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn's shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night.
Seven-year-old Calli Clark is sweet, gentle, a dreamer who suffers from selective mutism brought on by tragedy that pulled her deep into silence as a toddler.
Calli's mother, Antonia, tried to be the best mother she could within the confines of marriage to a mostly absent, often angry husband. Now, though she denies that her husband could be involved in the possible abductions, she fears her decision to stay in her marriage has cost her more than her daughter's voice.
Petra Gregory is Calli's best friend, her soul mate and her voice. But neither Petra nor Calli has been heard from since their disappearance was discovered. Desperate to find his child, Martin Gregory is forced to confront a side of himself he did not know existed beneath his intellectual, professorial demeanor.
Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets.
'Deeply moving and exquisitely lyrical, this is a powerhouse of a debut novel.' - Tess Gerritsen
'Beautifully written, compassionately told, and relentlessly suspenseful.' - Diane Chamberlain
'Gudenkauf moves the story forward at a fast clip and is adept at building tension.' - Publishers Weekly
Author
About Heather Gudenkauf
Heather Gudenkauf is the New York Times bestselling author of The Weight of Silence. Heather was born in Wagner, South Dakota, the youngest of six children. Having been born with a profound unilateral hearing impairment, Heather tended to use books as a retreat and escape the world around her. Heather became a voracious reader and the seed of becoming a writer was planted.
