Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say audiobook follows a teacher through private grief and public dread
Set in coastal Massachusetts, Elizabeth Strout’s Booker-longlisted novel centres on a history teacher confronting loneliness, family fracture and the threat of a divisive political return. The audiobook is narrated by Robert Petkoff, who brings out both the character’s quiet decency and his despair.
Artie Dam, a beloved history teacher in coastal Massachusetts, watches his students sink into pessimism as their own prospects and the wider world begin to look bleak. Their unease mirrors his own: he is appalled by the looming re-election of a cruel, divisive leader, even though the man is never named.
Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say places that public anxiety alongside a far more intimate crisis. Artie is lonely in his marriage to Evie, a therapist from a wealthy family who treats him as a “soft” man and does not seem interested in knowing him. He comes to believe that neither of them truly understands the other.
The novel traces that emotional distance back to a family tragedy a decade earlier, when the couple’s son Rob survived a car accident that killed his girlfriend, Heather. The loss appears to have deepened the fault lines in the marriage, leaving Artie increasingly isolated and unable to make sense of the life he is living.
That isolation becomes so severe that he contemplates suicide, if only he can find a discreet way to do it. The story then turns on an episode at sea, when something happens while Artie is sailing that changes his mind. A later revelation from Rob pushes him to reconsider both his family and his place in the world.
The book has been longlisted for this year’s Booker prize and uses Artie’s private turmoil to explore a wider social mood. Strout’s portrait of him is built around a simple but expansive idea: that every person carries “a vast, unknowable universe” within.
In audio form, the novel is read by actor Robert Petkoff, whose performance is described as capturing Artie’s kindness as well as his subdued despair. The narration helps shape the book as an interior study of a decent man under pressure, rather than a plot-driven drama.
The audiobook sits alongside other recent literary audio releases, including Colm Tóibín’s Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, read by Derbhle Crotty, and Annie Jacobsen’s Biological War: A Scenario, which she narrates herself. But Strout’s novel stands out for the way it ties a domestic breakdown to a broader sense of civic and existential unease.