What Nina Never Said

Twelve cassette tapes. One brother nobody ever mentioned. And a woman who has spent fifty years being paid to tell the truth exactly.

Nina Volkov Bennett is seventy-four, a retired court interpreter, and the most precise person anyone in her family has ever met. For fifty years she has rendered other people's worst moments word for word, without softening, without improving, without ever once being wrong.

Then a box arrives from Leningrad. Twelve tapes her mother recorded before she died, in a voice Nina has not heard since 1979. And on the second one, a name.

Lev.

Nina has a brother. Her daughter Anna, who has written only child on every medical form of her life, has an uncle. Her granddaughter Clara, who records people for a living, has a story.

What follows is not a search. It is a reckoning, conducted at a dining table in Watertown, Massachusetts, by three women who cannot agree on who owns the past and who love each other badly and completely. The letters were real. The silence was chosen. And somewhere in a Petersburg apartment, a man kept a door open for thirty years and never said so.

WHAT NINA NEVER SAID is a novel about translation and everything it leaves out: about the difference between what was said and everything a moment actually contains. It is for readers of upmarket family fiction who want an old woman at the centre who is difficult, funny, unsentimental and entirely unwilling to be forgiven on schedule.

A book club novel with an ending nobody sees coming, and a question that stays after it.