Secrets or Lies?

Even in the happiest, most intimate relationships, how much can people really know about each other? Is a person ever completely transparent to another? Should anyone be? In her latest novel, The Art of Keeping Secrets (NAL Trade Paperback Original, 349 pp., $14), Patti Callahan Henry explores the effects of secrets on two women who are unknowingly united by a tragedy.

Two years earlier, Annabelle Murphy’s husband left on a solo hunting trip. His plane crashed, and Annabelle has spent the intervening time caring for her children and taking comfort in the company of lifelong friends. Then comes the phone call from police. Her husband’s wrecked plane has finally been found, and he was not alone on the flight: A woman was with him. Annabelle is forced to think of her husband in a whole different way. Not only is her grief reawakened by the news, but the meaning of her entire life is thrown into uncertainty.

There is one person, seemingly unconnected to Annabelle, who knows the identity of the woman on the plane: Sofie Milstead, a young dolphin researcher in a coastal town. But Sofie has secrets of her own. And she believes she must keep her past protected at any cost, even if it means denying Annabelle the closure she desperately needs.

As Henry weaves together the stories of these two women, she investigates both the devastation that secrets can have on relationships while simultaneously showing, if not their necessity, then their inevitability. As Annabelle’s mother says, “We all keep secrets, Belle. Sometimes we won’t admit it even to ourselves, but there are spaces in our hearts where we hide things from ourselves and others.” As the secrets are revealed, cracking the safe, solid relationships that Annabelle and Sofie have relied on, they begin to see that the rough edges might just make something new, if not necessarily better, in their lives.