Sumner Locke Elliott

Careful, He Might Hear You

Published 1963

The "he" in the admonitory title of Mr. Elliott's absorbing Australian family novel is six years old, and the warning to speak in whispers is issued iteratively by his childless aunts, the sisters of his dead mother. The boy is whimsically called "'P.S." to indicate that, among the bereft, he is the epilogue to his mother's short, exuberant life as a luminary of Sydney's literary Bohemia and the only souvenir of her short, halcyon marriage to a diamond in the rough who, long before his son was born, decamped for the hinterlands and to hunt for gold. P.S.