Careful, he might hear you

The "he" in the admonitory title of Mr. Elliott's absorbing Australian family novel is six years old, and the warning to speak in whispers is issued iteratively by his childless aunts, the sisters of his dead mother. The boy is whimsically called "'P.S." to indicate that, among the bereft, he is the epilogue to his mother's short, exuberant life as a luminary of Sydney's literary Bohemia and the only souvenir of her short, halcyon marriage to a diamond in the rough who, long before his son was born, decamped for the hinterlands and to hunt for gold. P.S. has been reared so far by his good, mawkish, genteel Aunt Lila, the only matron of the four remaining sisters, and her laborer husband, George, in their working-class house in a working-class suburb. Now, eavesdropping on a hot night in December, he learns, that a disturbance of this status quo is threatened and that the author of it is to be Vanessa, the aunt he has never seen... *Jean Stafford*