Talk Talk

A novel that explores the ultimate 21st-century nightmare: identity theft.
This masterful novel explores the ultimate 21st-century nightmare: identity theft. Dana Halter, a thirty-something deaf schoolteacher, is on her way to an emergency dentist appointment and inadvertently runs a stop sign. When the policeman pulls her over, he discovers that she is wanted for a long list of felonies and whisks her off to the local jail for a weekend. The only trouble is Dana is innocent — the victim of a status-seeking California man supporting his shopaholic girlfriend. Dana is locked up with abusive prostitutes and drunks and shuttled through the Kafka-esque bureaucracy of the criminal justice system. Her boyfriend Bridger, meanwhile, fights unsuccessfully to help her. As Dana struggles for her freedom and the innocence she took for granted, the frustration of literally living as a hearing-impaired person and metaphorically losing one’s ability to communicate becomes achingly clear.

As thrilling as it is sympathetic, Talk Talk’s suspenseful story is propelled by tension and anxiety. In devastatingly precise prose, Boyle keeps the action rolling as he mines questions of identity and language. Thankfully, this audio version does his page-turner justice: Boyle’s own expert reading will have listeners leaning in to absorb his every word.