THE LISTENERS
Canadian National Bestsellers list
2021 Giller Prize Finalist
Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of 2021
CBC Books Best Canadian Fiction of 2021
NOW Magazine Top 10 Book of 2021
While lying in bed next to her husband one night, Claire Devon hears a low hum that he cannot. And, it seems, no one else can either.
This innocuous noise begins causing Claire headaches, nosebleeds, insomnia, gradually upsetting the balance of her life, though no obvious source or medical cause can be found. When she discovers that a student of hers can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of neighbours who also perceive the sound. What starts as a neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something more extreme and with far-reaching, devastating consequences.
The Listeners explores the seduction of the wild and unknowable, the human search for the transcendent, the rise of conspiracy culture in the West, and the desire for community and connection in our increasingly polarised times.
The Listeners was originally written as a story for a new opera by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek. The opera was commissioned by the Norwegian National Opera, Opera Philadelphia and Lyric Opera of Chicago and premiered in Oslo in September 24 2022. The US performances take place in September 2024 (Philadelphia) and March/April 2025 (Chicago).
The Listeners is being adapted into a limited series, produced by Element Pictures (Normal People, The Favourite, Poor Things), a Fremantle company, and directed by Janicza Bravo (Zola, Poker Face, Mrs America) for BBC One and BBC iPlayer. The series stars Rebecca Hall (Christine, Vicky Christina Barcelona), Ollie West (Hamnet), Prasanna Puwanarajah (The Crown, Patrick Melrose), Amr Waked (Ramy), Gayle Rankin (Men), and Mia Tharia (Phoenix Rise), among others.
“The Listeners is at once a revery for the sublime, for the innocuous tapestry of sounds that make up the rhythms of our lives — and the pollution of sounds that can tear and devour. It is at once a masterful interrogation of the body, as well as the desperate violence that undergirds our lives in the era of social media, conspiracies, isolation and environmental degradation. Tannahill writes as both poet and playwright, millennial and philosopher, as one who trains his reader to attune to the frequency of 'the Hum' to experience a rich hinterland beyond our embodied senses, beyond our perceptions of grace or faith. I leave listening, even to the silences, which are always screaming, and posit myself in my cochlea, forever now a conch, flaring and reeling, primordially.”
— The 2021 Giller Prize jury citation
“Compellingly explores the vexed relationships between the domestic and the political. Enigmatic and provocative, The Listeners is apt to stretch and warp its readers’ own perspectives, as a funhouse mirror for our times.”
— The Toronto Star
“A sharp, tense, and extremely readable novel. It leaves one feeling a little unsteady, a little unclean…”
— Quill & Quire
“The Listeners starts as a little hum in your ear and ends up blowing the top off your head. A deeply plausible, funny, horrifying story of a journey right off the rails.”
– Emma Donoghue, author of Room and The Pull of the Stars
“The Listeners is a breathtakingly, breathholdingly good novel from one of the most original writers in this country. Tannahill serves up enormous ideas in delicious slices. What’s truth? Who do we trust? Is skepticism better than belief? He has a playwright’s ear and a director’s eye. I didn’t so much read the novel as watch it unfold. The Listeners is breathtakingly, breathholdingly good.”
— Ian Williams, Giller Prize winning author of Reproduction
“I loved this book. Tannahill is such a skilled prose stylist that this book manages to be both a page-turning unravelling of a family and a manic, fully-alive monologue of a woman going over the edge.”
– Zoe Whittall, author of The Best Kind of People and The Spectacular
“Tannahill has written an engaging, shocking and hilarious story about how a woman's search for deeper meaning leads to an entire town being in crisis. It is a testament to the revulsion and horror an ordinary person can inspire when they decide to simply peek outside of the box.”
— Heather O’Neill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night
“The Listeners is one of those rare novels that entered my soul, rearranged my brain cells and then my world view. Tannahill writes with the heat and wisdom of a God.”
— Claudia Dey, author of Heartbreaker and Stunt
“Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners is breathtakingly timely. It’s an enigmatic story of 21st-century melancholia motored by sentences at once propulsive and erudite (that beautiful synthesis). Everyone’s going to be talking about this book.”
– Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body
Published in the United Kingdom by 4th Estate on July 8, 2021
Published in Canada by HarperCollins Canada on August 17, 2021