Songs Without Words Book

Ann Packer's debut novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, was a nationwide best seller that established her as one of our most gifted chroniclers of the interior lives of women. Now, in her long-awaited second novel, she takes us on a journey into a lifelong friendship pushed to the breaking point. Expertly, with the keen introspection and psychological nuance that are her hallmarks, she explores what happens when there are inequities between friends and when the hard-won balances of a long relationship are disturbed, perhaps irreparably, by a harrowing crisis.Liz and Sarabeth were childhood neighbors in the suburbs of northern California, brought as close as sisters by 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 attempts to make a happy life for herself despite the shadow cast by her mother's act their relationship remained a source of continuity and...

The Washington Post - Carrie Brown

Packer solidifies the reputation she established in the enormously successful The Dive from Clausen's Pier as an uncannily observant chronicler of contemporary American domestic life. Songs Without Words touches every nerve exposed by the solidly middle-class dilemmas of today's parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers…Packer is no ironist; she is not Claire Messud or Zadie Smith, whose most recent novels unspool under the cool panoramic gaze of a social critic. The characters in Packer's novels are not so much exposed as they are understood…Packer is devoted to her characters, and it is her pleasure as a novelist—and ours as her readers—to watch these people move through the intensely familiar and intimate hours of their days and nights…her pursuit is so unnervingly attentive that it becomes revelatory. Middle-of-the-night readers…who cannot put down Songs Without Words will surely look up at the darkest hour with the sense that they are being watched.