Songs Without Words

Liz and Sarabeth have been friends forever, childhood neighbours bound together in adolescence by a devastating event, the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother when the girls were just sixteen. In the decades that followed – through Liz’s marriage and the birth of her children, through Sarabeth’s depressions and her volatile love affairs – their relationship has remained a source of continuity and strength, a fixed point amid the tumult of their adult lives. But when an unforeseen calamity strikes at the heart of Liz’s family, all the assumptions – the deepest habits of their friendship – are revealed in a strange new light, and Liz and Sarabeth must question everything they thought they knew about each other and themselves. Ann Packer’s new novel expertly explores the inequities between close friends, the unspoken roles, hidden expectations and deep resentments that can be violently exposed by a true crisis, and the endurance and limits of bonds forged in childhood.