Jan-Philipp Sendker is a masterful storyteller. In “Whispering Shadows” he exposes the seamier side of life in modern-day China while the story within a story of a despairing American expat also unfolds and adds another dimension to the novel.
Sendker takes his time telling this narrative, yet so much happens in the first 10 pages that it is hard to put the book down. We meet Paul Leibovitz, a retired journalist living on a small island off Hong Kong who has spent three years trying to recover from some tragedy and a marriage breakdown.
The back-story on Leibovitz’s life is heartbreaking and we really start to care about his isolation and inability to move on from past life events. The story picks up when he encounters an American woman who, along with her husband, is looking for her missing son. The son had been managing the family business accounts and doing a good job of navigating the complexities of conducting business in the hornet’s nest that is China’s economy. So what happened to him?
