Tannahill is a playwright, filmmaker, author and theatre director. He has twice won the Governor General's Literary Award for drama: in 2014 for Age of Minority and in 2018 for Botticelli in the Fire & Sunday in Sodom. He is also the author of the novel Liminal. While lying in bed next to her husband one night, Claire Devon hears a low hum that he cannot. And, it seems, no one else can either. This innocuous noise begins causing Claire headaches, nosebleeds, insomnia, gradually upsetting the balance of her life, though no obvious source or medical cause can be found. When she discovers that a student of hers can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of neighbours who also perceive the sound. What starts as a neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something far more extreme and with far-reaching, devastating consequences.

Throughout, Claire herself and a few other characters are reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, a purposeful clue to this being a book about a clash of ideas, and also raising questions of how life is experienced via the body and mind (spirit, I think, is the term that Mann uses). Concepts of mystery and wonder are raised but evade any kind of definition or explanation - isn't that their defining essence? One night, while lying in bed next to her husband, Claire Devon suddenly hears a low hum. This innocuous sound, which no one else in the house can hear, has no obvious source or medical cause, but it begins to upset the balance of Claire's life. When she discovers that one of her students can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of people who also perceive the sound. What starts out as a kind of neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something much more extreme, with far-reaching, devastating consequences. One night, Claire Devon realizes that she is hearing a constant low hum that won’t go away. Her husband Paul doesn’t hear it. Neither does her daughter, Ashley. I was lying beside Paul in bed. He was reading the New York Times on his tablet , and I was marking student essays on Twelfth Night.Was the intention to present a satirical story in which the main character showcases every demeaning characteristic of a person that resides comfortably on a planet unbeknownst to us all? If this book had put forth the main character with some gumption, some depth to her person & perhaps a personality that did not make me feel eager to see her downfall, there might have been something going for this story. Where things stand, the author held a plot that was intriguing yet was unable to fulfill the attempt at writing a story to coincide with a horror in a way that saw it succeed. I have always turned to books for this. I've been a voracious reader since I was a girl. I was raised by a single mother and a television. There were no books in our apartment growing up, so I would take out as many as I was allowed from the library, and sometimes a few more which weren't returned. I've always been drawn to stories of women pushed to the brink, living through extraordinary times, and enduring remarkable hardship. I have no time for stories about people mired in self-pity or self-destruction, who flounder around helplessly and hopelessly, I mean who cares, just get on with it. Even though my life really goes down the shitter in this one, I hope that you'll take me at my word when I say that I truly fought every second of the way, and I did not, and still do not, see myself as a victim. In fact, I'm sure many people see me as a villain in this story, but I try not to see myself as that either. Playwright April De Angelis joins Tom to talk about her new musical Gin Craze! Described as 'a booze soaked love ballad from the women of Gin Lane.' The Listeners, by Jordan Tannahill, is a thought-provoking examination of how relationships, mental health issues, gender expectations, and the media can all intersect.

I was hoping that was the end of it, but I could tell it was still working on Paul as he lay there, staring up at the ceiling. For such a giant man, he could be like a little boy when he stewed on something. Until that evening and my conversation with Ashley on the staircase, I don’t think I fully grasped the extent to which hysteria was a psychic wound that we as women still bore; a wound inflicted from centuries of our symptoms, our instincts about our own bodies, our pleasures and afflictions, always being the first to be discounted and discredited, even by other women. Even by our own daughters, as the case may be. It was a wound that we still carried, because we could, at any moment, have an entire history called upon to silence us in a word, in an instant. Tannahill takes what could be a rote thriller and turns it into a reflection on female agency and “hysteria,” the effect of industrialization on our present world, and the dangers of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. He does so while circling a student-teacher relationship that’s deeply uncomfortable, making a reader question where they would draw their own line in the search for respite. I think that was the departure point for this story and how that ostracizes her from her life and drives her into a more extreme trajectory where she's seeking the comfort and companionship of initially a student of hers, who can also hear the hum, and then ultimately strangers. So that's where, for me, it began.Claire is validated when Kyle, one of her students, says he’s also been hearing The Hum. They strike up a friendship to investigate the sound, but the connotations surrounding their relationship prove damaging when exposed. The conspiracy is what's being done to us....It's only a theory until there's evidence, and the evidence is all around us....p234 Gay rights activists infiltrate Dorchester Hotel in protest over Brunei death penalty". Metro, April 6, 2019. There was a team of French scientists who believed that possibly the hum was being created by ocean waves rolling against the ocean floor or concussing against the continental shelf and causing vibrations. There were theories about the possibility that it was the windstream shearing against a low pressure system that caused the sound, or possibly it was human made — a technological sort of noise pollution, like the sound of the electric grid or radio waves or submarine pings that were causing these sounds. From there on in The Listeners becomes a character study wrapped up in a mystery. Jordan Tannahill draws the intricate relationships cleverly, offering up seemingly inappropriate actions that in the moment feel exactly right. As Claire descends further down the rabbit hole things get intensely disturbing yet also strangely uplifting, the finale is pitched perfectly leaving you with mixed feelings and a sense of melancholy.