Tell Me What I Am: A Novel

Two women wrenched apart by a family member’s disappearance must find a way back to each other in this haunting page-turner by the author of A Crooked Tree.



Nessa Garvey’s sister Deena vanished without a trace in Philadelphia in 2004. In all that time, Nessa has never once doubted what her instincts told her: her sister’s ex-husband has gotten away with an unspeakable crime.

Nessa’s niece, Ruby, is raised by her father, the man Nessa suspects, in rural Vermont, on the shores of Lake Champlain. Ruby learns how to hunt, how the plants and trees grow, how to avoid making her father angry. The one question she longs to ask is the one she knows she cannot voice: What really happened to her mother?

Over fourteen years, four hundred miles apart, these two women slowly begin to unearth the family history of insidious power and control that has shaped them both in such different ways. But can they reach each other in time?

Tell Me What I Am is a riveting, indelible tour de force of buried secrets and unlikely resilience.