Small Silent Things

Jocelyn Morrow's life in Southern California looks polished from the outside. She is raising her six-year-old daughter, Lucy, with her husband, Conrad, and moves among wealthy white women even though she is not white. Her designer clothing hides scars across her back and a deeper sense of guilt, a belief that something in her made her a target. When her mother dies, long-buried memories of childhood abuse resurface, and she finds herself increasingly fixated on Kate, her tennis coach.

Across the road lives Simon Bonaventure, a successful landscape architect and a Rwandan refugee. He has never stopped grieving the wife and daughter he lost in the genocide two decades earlier, and the people who killed them still haunt his thoughts. Then he receives a letter that purportedly comes from his daughter, now grown, who has questions for a father she has never known.

As Jocelyn and Simon slowly become friends, they discover that their hidden pasts connect them. The novel considers parenthood, identity, desire, and how trauma passes from one generation to the next. It is a lyrical, haunting debut by Robin Page.