What Jonah Knew: A Novel

A spellbinding literary thriller packed with psychological suspense and profound questions about motherhood, trauma and how death illuminates life.Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins

Barbara Graham is a literary alchemist. What Jonah Knew not only grabs you from the first page, it makes the mystical believable and the human predicament shine with wit, wisdom, and love.Tara Brach, meditation teacher and bestselling author of Radical Acceptance and Radical Compassion

A seven-year-old boy inexplicably recalls the memories of a missing 22-year-old musician in this psychological thriller about the fierce love between mothers and sons across lifetimes, a work of gripping suspense with a supernatural twist that will mesmerize fans of Chloe Benjamin and Lisa Jewell.

Helen Bird will stop at nothing to find Henry, her musician son who has mysteriously disappeared in upstate New York. Though the cops believe Henrys absence is voluntary, Helen knows better.

While she searches for himjoined finally by policeJonah is born to Lucie and Matt Pressman of Manhattan. Lucie does all she can to be the kind of loving, attentive mother she never had, but cant stop Jonahs night terrors or his obsession with the imaginary other mom and dog he insists are real.

Whether Jonahs anxiety is caused by nature or nurtureor something else entirelyis the propulsive mystery at the heart of the novel.

All hell breaks loose when the Pressmans rent a summer cottage in Aurora Falls, where Helen lives. How does Jonah, at seven, know so much about Henry, Helens still-missing son? Is it just a bizarre coincidence? An expression of Jungs collective unconscious? Or could Jonah be the reincarnation of Henry?

Faced with more questions than answers, Helen and Lucie set out to make sense of the insensible, a heart-stopping quest that forces them to redefine not just what it is to be a mother or a human being, but the very nature of lifeand deathbecause of what Jonah knows.