The Silent Sister

The Silent Sister blends the narrative conventions of the psychological thriller with the thematic depth of the family saga. As a psychological thriller, the novel focuses on the protagonist’s internal state. Access to Riley’s thoughts and feelings creates empathy for her and builds suspense as her reality becomes progressively destabilized.

Much like in contemporary thrillers such as Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl or Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, the conflict is driven less by external action and more by the protagonist’s dawning realization that her foundational beliefs are false. Riley’s quest is not to solve a crime in the traditional sense but to reconstruct her own identity after discovering the elaborate lies that have shaped her life. The narrative tension accumulates through a series of carefully placed revelations—a mysterious postcard, a box of old newspaper clippings, a cryptic comment—that force Riley, and the reader, to question everything she knows about her family and herself.

Novels that focus on the unfolding of a family’s history are called “family sagas.” Although The Silent Sister doesn’t feature the sprawling scope of a conventional family saga, Riley’s investigation into the truth of her identity leads her to a more complete understanding of her family’s past and develops themes commonly found in family sagas, particularly the effects of long-held secrets and the fallibility of memory. Family sagas generally follow several generations over a long period of time and have several subplots spread among their large cast of characters. Popular examples of this genre are Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. 

The novel traces the consequences of a single family secret across more than two decades, showing how the parents’ decision to hide Lisa’s pregnancy ripples outward, defining the lives of all three of their children. By moving between the past of the late 1980s and the present of 2013, the story reveals the origins of the family’s dysfunction and the generational impact of trauma. The suspense of the thriller plot compels the narrative forward, while the themes of the family saga allow for a poignant exploration of memory, grief, and the enduring weight of the past.