The History of Sound

Gabi's Review

Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, released in March 2024, is an evocative collection of twelve interconnected short stories spanning three centuries of New England life, from 1696 Nantucket to modern-day Maine. Structured as paired “hook-and-chain” couplets, each story echoes or offers a twist on its companion piece. The result is a quietly elegant blend of restraint and resonance. One example of this pairing is the link between the title story, in which two musicians, Lionel and David, record folk songs in 1919, their love unfolding against the shadow of war, and the later ‘Origin Stories,’ in which a woman, uncovering their wax cylinders decades later, reframes her own heartbreak. In both stories, as throughout the collection, Shattuck’s prose is spare yet vivid, painting landscapes and emotions with a painter’s eye (he’s a visual artist, too).

The stories intrigue with the creation of subtle layers: artifacts like paintings, journals, or a hidden object in a chimney link past and present, inviting readers to unearth meaning. A logger’s murder in ‘August in the Forest’ unravels in ‘The Journal of Thomas Thurber,’ blending suspense with a sense of raw humanity. In this way, Shattuck’s prose bends like light; his descriptions don’t simply paint scenes, but using the sounds of words, they turn the mundane into something luminous. In the story ‘The Shoals,’ a fisherman’s widow sees the sea as “a quilt of grey stitched with white thread,’ the rhythm mirroring her grief. Such precise descriptions, distilled like frost on New England panes, reveal more as you lean closer.

Shattuck doesn’t overexplain; he trusts you to make connections, making each revelation feel earned. While this thoughtful restraint can occasionally leave some threads unresolved, the collection’s strength lies in its echoing of emotions and states of mind: love, loss, and longing reverberate across time, grounded in a New England so alive that it’s a character itself. The History of Sound is a haunting tapestry of experiences—carefully crafted, intelligent and deeply felt, it lives up to the description of the collection as a love letter to Shattuck’s precious New England. 

Publisher's Review 

Soon to be a major movie starring Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor.

'Exquisitely crafted, deeply imagined, exhilaratingly diverse, The History of Sound places Ben Shattuck firmly among the very finest of our storytellers' - Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of Horse

In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck's inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond-into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artefacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home.