There's No Telling

By: Mark Mordue

Length: Not Yet Known

Publisher's summary

From critically acclaimed author Mark Mordue comes a poetic, compressed and powerfully beautiful novel, which will work its way under your skin.

A sunny, bright, cold Christmas morning. Two young girls go ice-skating on a frozen pond and tragically drown. Lives are lost, and lives are irrevocably changed.

Three years later, on Christmas Eve, Darcy Travers, the father of one of the girls, is struggling with the anniversary, as he does each year, battling with his inability to accept the loss of his daughter. Sometimes, he feels, she's still there, ghost-like, just on the edge of his vision, watching over him. Zel, his ex-wife, is similarly bereft. Like Darcy she is consumed by grief and rage, as the pair blame each other. They are bonded in their suffering with their neighbors, Pete and Suda Kelly, the parents of the other girl who drowned.

As snowy winter weather sets in around the town of Thule, and night closes in on Christmas Eve, a series of unexpected events propels the lives of these people together once more.

From critically acclaimed writer Mark Mordue comes a darkly beautiful novel about grief and love, and how they are inextricably intertwined. How does a parent endure the loss of a much-loved child? What happens to someone suffering that kind of grief? And how might Christmas feel in the years to come if you had a lost child to put to rest in your soul? Both a love story and ghost story, There's No Telling is about grief, loss, shame and redemption—and how we can work our way back from the very worst thing that can happen to us.

©2025 Mark Mordue (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers