Book #2 : We Hear Voices, Evie Green

About the Book:

An eerie horror debut about a little boy who recovers from a mysterious pandemic and inherits an imaginary friend who makes him do violent things...

Kids have imaginary friends. Rachel knows this. So when her young son, Billy, miraculously recovers from a horrible flu that has proven fatal for many, she thinks nothing of Delfy, his new invisible friend. After all, her family is healthy and that's all that matters.

But soon Delfy is telling Billy what to do, and the boy is acting up and lashing out in ways he never has before. As Delfy's influence is growing stranger and more sinister by the day, and rising tensions threaten to tear Rachel's family apart, she clings to one purpose: to protect her children at any cost--even from themselves.

We Hear Voices is a mischievously gripping near-future horror novel that tests the fragility of family and the terrifying gray area between fear and love. 

Want to hear a sample from the mouth of the author herself, check out this link: Evie Green Reading the Book

https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=1m7RUhOtnB7EJ-8CF5CPbClsKZ8-Ypamn

Discussion Questions: 

1.   What was your first impression of Delfy, the imaginary friend? 

2.    Did you sympathize with Rachel and the way she dealt with the escalating horrors in her life? 

3.    What echoes do you see with the current global situation? 

4.    Do you think Nina will make it into space? 

5.    Which character do you most identify with? 

6.    WE HEAR VOICES is set in the near future: do you believe that the division between rich and poor citizens in the book is far removed from way the world currently is? 

7.    Could you/would you deploy into space? Could you imagine living and dying and raising families onboard a new planet? 

8.    What do you think the symbology of the spiders was? What did they mean to you? 

9.    What did you think of the ending? 


We were fortunate enough to have Evie join our discussion and to pick her brain more about this book that somehow parallels our current world. 

Ten things you might not know about Emily Barr or is it Evie Green......

  • She was incredibly shy as a child. She was always observing at school, and only spoke up if she absolutely had to. She wishes she could go back and tell her young self that no one would laugh at me if she spoke (probably).
  • Her superpower is curing hiccups. She wishes it was invisibility.
  • She listens to conversations everywhere she goes and often writes them down. Then she find the notes and it takes her ages to remember what on earth it’s all about.
  • She once had two ladies sitting behind her on a train, talking incessantly. She was hammering away at my laptop, writing the end of Flora Banks, and it all went quiet when, She realized  they were reading over my shoulder. Then one of them loudly whispered to the other: ‘I don’t think it’s going to be winning the Booker prize’.
  • She wakes up early to write before anyone else in her house is up and wants her attention. If you’re awake before you want to be, you might as well be writing a book.
  • She loves traveling  She would spend all my time and money on traveling if she could. One of Flora Banks’s rules for life is ‘don’t go to Svalbard in winter’. She wrote that in the book so many times that in the end she had to go. She now thinks you should go to the Arctic in winter: it’s wonderful.
  • Her husband Craig writes children’s books. They often spend working days writing side by side, and they consult each other all the time, about everything.
  • Ever since she was a teenager, she has been obsessed with the music of Leonard Cohen. He smiled at her in 2010, which was nice.
  • She is currently writing her fourth YA book, which is set in Europe over a hot summer filled with dread, and which features a psychic cousin arriving to stay.
  • If she can’t sleep (and she often can’t), she finds that the audiobook of I, Partridge: We Need to Talk about Alan sends her straight to sleep, chuckling.

Evie Green is a pseudonym for a British author Emily Barr who has written professionally for her entire adult life. She lives by the sea in England with her husband, children, and guinea pigs, and loves writing in the very early morning, fueled by coffee.

It has been an enormous amount of fun for her writing this, and the book went on a strange journey to publication before finding its perfect editor in the form of Jen Monroe at Berkley, in New York. Although it features a pandemic, it was written long before Covid-19 turned up, and the flu in the story is just the start of it all...





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