The Reliable Narrator

Darby Small has made invisibility an art. As one of New York’s most sought-after ghostwriters, she tells other people’s stories so seamlessly they forget she was ever there. In an age of AI-generated prose, she is prized for what machines cannot do: capture a voice so authentic it feels lived-in. For Darby, disappearing into other lives is both her superpower and her refuge. Then comes a late-night message from Phoebe Zaslove, Darby’s truest friend-fearless, magnetic, and now terminally ill. For reasons Darby cannot name, the women have not spoken in a year. But Phoebe is running out of time and makes one final request: Write my story. Set between the wooded banks of New York’s Hudson River and Albuquerque’s lush North Valley, The Reliable Narrator is a layered, emotionally charged novel about the unbreakable bond between friends, the legacies carried from mothers to daughters, and the truths we bury to survive. As Darby walks Phoebe into the last chapter of her life, she is forced to confront her own traumas, her family’s silences, and the realization that fragments of her truth have been hiding in plain sight in every book she has ever ghostwritten. With piercing insight and lyrical prose, The Reliable Narrator asks: What stories do we inherit? Which do we dare to tell? What is the price of silence? Because some truths aren’t hidden, they are simply waiting to be claimed.