The Safe Sound

The pond freezes early and hard the winter Andy turns ten. He is the best young hockey player his small New Hampshire town has produced-and the one who best understands what the ice is saying.

His father taught him the difference. The deep boom that means the cold is working and the pond is growing harder underfoot. And the soft, close sound that means the surface is about to give-the one you come in on.

That winter, the more dangerous weather is inside the house.

Andy's father lives with a mind that moves through seasons no one has the words for: brilliant and warm one week, unrecognizable the next. The household learns to live by its changing pressure, reading a face across the kitchen table the way a boy reads bad ice from the bank. And after a night the family will not speak of for years, Andy comes to understand that the vigilance the pond taught him is the same thing keeping his mother and his younger brother and sister alive.

The Safe Sound is a spare, luminous novel about listening, inheritance, and love under strain-the story of a boy who learns to read danger too well, of who teaches him, and of what that gift takes from him and what it hands him to keep.

Set in 1970s New Hampshire and told in quiet, unforgettable prose, this is a debut of remarkable restraint and feeling: a book about the weather inside a family, and the child who learns to forecast it.

"Most people don't hear it. You do."

For readers of literary fiction about family, memory, and the private worlds of childhood-in the tradition of Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, Jenny Offill, and Kent Haruf.