A Novel

When Soft
Voices Die…

Winner, 2023 IML Publications Fiction Contest
Bromme, author portrait

A family, revealed over time

Farlow Scattergood, a boy of three, loses his parents in an airplane crash. He grows up on his family’s farm, with his aunt as his guardian and his dear friend Cappy Bones at his side.

When he is fourteen, a series of letters addressed to him from his late mother begins to arrive. They reveal that she had a premonition of her death. Through them Farlow discovers his identity as a Lenape. His mother holds another secret that will change his life forever, but first he must solve the mystery of how his parents truly died.

When Soft Voices Die… is a completed literary novel.

From Chapter 3, “The First Letter”
“Cold feet in wet shoes, the horizon darkens, it is time for me to exit this paradise. Climbing down from the widow’s walk, I throw a coincidental glance up the stairwell to the heavens. As quick as a twig snaps, I glimpse a streak of light sparking across the cobalt sky. It is the first time I felt I had a real mother, beautiful for only a moment.”
News

Milestones

  • Foreword and authenticity read

    Joe Baker of the Lenape Center will write the foreword, and Hadrien Coumans of the Lenape Center will perform the authenticity read.
    Aug 2024

  • IML Publications 2023 Fiction Contest

    When Soft Voices Die… was named the winner.
    Feb 2024

  • Novel excerpt in The Write Launch

    The first chapter was published as a novel excerpt.
    Excerpt
On the Title

The title is drawn from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “To —”:

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.Percy Bysshe Shelley