When We Were Silent

A Dublin Catholic school’s culture of silence proves deadly in Irish journalist McPhillips’s searing debut novel. In 1986, 17-year-old Louise Manson enrolls at the prestigious Highfield Manor to avenge her best friend Tina, who got pregnant and killed herself after being repeatedly raped by Maurice McQueen, the school’s gym teacher and swim coach. McQueen promptly molests Lou, but when she reports him to school authorities, nobody believes her. Desperate and furious, Lou hatches a plan to publicly expose McQueen that ends in someone’s death. Thirty-plus years later, Lou—now a married professor with a teenage daughter—has worked hard to move past “the Highfield Affair.” When an attorney asks her to testify on behalf of a 14-year-old suing Highfield for the “systemic cover-up of abuse in the school and the swimming club over decades,” she reluctantly agrees. Then someone tries to extort her into staying silent, prompting Lou to again take matters into her own hands, with shattering results. McPhillips deftly alternates between past and present, maximizing suspense by playing multiple mysteries in each timeline off one another. With the added urgency of Lou’s first-person-present narration, the author wrings her powerful plot for maximum impact. This is a triumph. (May)