In Halifax's North End, Mara Ilyev returns to her late aunt's rent-controlled walk-up to clear rooms of stubborn dust and unanswered letters. In a closet she finds a cracked violin case, a chipped cobalt mug, and a shoebox of cassette tapes labeled only with dates. The neighbor across the hall, Osric Keane, a retired radio technician, insists the tapes are "blank", yet the answering machine keeps recording small nocturnal clicks, as if the apartment itself were breathing.
As the city debates razing a defunct lighthouse across the harbor, Mara threads the tapes through a salvaged reel-to-reel and hears faint breaths, gulls, and a melody she half-remembers from childhood. With Osric's makeshift antennae and a thermos of tea, they begin mapping the sounds to bus timetables, foghorn schedules, and the pattern of lights on Barrington Street. What emerges is a cartography of grief linking a dockworker's lost son, a runaway cellist, and her aunt's guarded kindness. On the night of demolition, Mara must choose between silence and broadcasting the whispers to a city hungry for proof of care.
The novel keeps asking what listening does to a city in flux: how attention can be a form of repair. Grief threads the soundscapes, not as spectacle but as labor, and the question of broadcasting those whispers becomes a test of "evidence of care" rather than noise.
Halifax's North End hums with gulls, bus brakes, and window light, an acoustic map that turns row houses and a doomed lighthouse into living instruments.
Mara is not a sleuth so much as a careful listener, and her hesitations feel earned. Osric's dry wit masks a bruised attentiveness, and their small rituals, tea and antennae and the business of cleaning, read like trust accumulating one notch at a time. Dialogue is minimal but weighted, with pauses that carry a surprising charge.
The book structures itself like a mixtape; each dated tape cues a scene where ambient sound carries meaning. The prose hums with soft consonants and tide-like cadences, though a few descriptive swells overstay their welcome before the radiowork and timetables bring the focus back into a resonant line.
Mara's return to her aunt's North End walk-up becomes a tender investigation as the "blank" tapes, a cracked violin case, and a failing lighthouse guide a quiet suspense. The pacing breathes, then tightens, and by demolition night the city feels like it is leaning in to listen.
