The Things We Cannot Say

What Babcia Whispers

Alice Michaels has always loved her grandmother Babcia but has never been able to reach her. Babcia arrived in America after the war and has never spoken of Poland, never spoken of what she left behind, never spoken of the years that made her who she is. Alice, managing a busy household with a husband and a son with autism whose needs structure every day, has not pushed.

Then Babcia has a stroke, and in the hospital she begins whispering names. Tomasz. Aleksy. Names that mean nothing to Alice’s mother or uncle. Names that suggest a life before the life anyone in the family knew about. Alice’s mother cannot travel to Poland to investigate; Alice, exhausted and overwhelmed, finds herself on a plane to Trzebinia.

Alina, 1939–1942

The novel’s historical thread follows Alina, a young Polish woman whose love for Tomasz — a local boy, her whole future — collides with the Nazi occupation of their village. Rimmer’s research into the occupation of rural Poland is thorough, and the historical sections are rendered with the specific texture that separates serious historical fiction from costume drama: the way the occupation arrives in stages, the way compliance and resistance coexist in the same person, the specific calculations made by those trying to protect children and neighbors while surviving themselves.

The relationship between Alina and Tomasz is not simply a wartime romance but a study of what two people who love each other are capable of doing under pressure that cannot be imagined in peacetime. Rimmer understands that the choices made under occupation are not heroic or cowardly in any simple sense — they are human, which is more complicated.

Alice’s Contemporary Strand

The contemporary thread earns more than it might seem to. Alice’s life — the specific difficulties of parenting a child with high needs, the particular fatigue of a marriage stretched thin by those needs, her own sense of lost selfhood — is handled with genuine insight and avoids the condescension that sometimes attaches to depictions of autism in popular fiction. Her son Eddie is a person, not a narrative device.

Her journey to Poland is partly detective work and partly the kind of confrontation with family history that changes who you are in relation to it.

The Things Left Unsaid

What gives the novel its title — and its emotional core — is the question of why Babcia never spoke. Rimmer does not allow simple answers. The silence was not only about pain or shame; it was about the impossibility of language for certain experiences, and the way love can choose silence over the burden it would impose on those who came after.

Kelly Rimmer and the WWII Family Saga

Kelly Rimmer is an Australian author who built a substantial career in women’s and historical fiction before The Things We Cannot Say became one of her breakout titles. The novel reflects something more than research for her — Rimmer has spoken about her own Polish heritage as part of what drew her to the wartime experience of ordinary rural Poles, a perspective often overshadowed in popular World War II fiction by stories set in the camps, in occupied Paris, or among the resistance networks of Western Europe. By rooting the historical thread in a Polish village and in the impossible day-to-day calculations of people trying simply to survive and protect their families, Rimmer occupies a corner of the genre that feels less worn than it might. She has continued to write in this vein, with later historical novels such as The Warsaw Orphan returning to occupied Poland, so readers who connect with this book have a clear path to more of her work.

Where It Sits in the Genre

The Things We Cannot Say belongs to the wave of dual-timeline World War II novels that became one of the dominant modes of book-club fiction in the 2010s, the territory of The Nightingale, All the Light We Cannot See, and The Tattooist of Auschwitz. What distinguishes Rimmer’s contribution is the seriousness of her contemporary thread. In many books of this type, the present-day frame is a thin device — a granddaughter discovering letters — that exists only to deliver the historical story. Here, Alice’s storyline carries genuine weight in its own right, particularly in its portrayal of parenting a child with autism, which Rimmer renders with specificity and without the sentimentality or condescension the subject often attracts. The result is a novel where both timelines earn their place, and where the act of uncovering family history changes the present rather than merely explaining it.

Who Should Read It and How to Approach It

This novel is a strong choice for readers who love emotionally rich, well-researched historical fiction and for book clubs, which will find plenty to discuss in its questions about silence, survival, and inherited trauma. Readers should know going in that it is a genuinely affecting book that deals with loss, impossible wartime choices, and the long shadow of secrets kept across generations; it is built to move its audience, and it does. Those who prefer history rendered with moral ambiguity will appreciate Rimmer’s refusal to sort her wartime characters into simple heroes and cowards — the choices made under occupation are presented as human and complicated rather than clean. Readers seeking unflinching historical realism may find the ending resolves a touch more neatly than the period’s brutality would suggest, but for most readers that emotional payoff is exactly what they come to the genre for. Approached as character-driven historical fiction with real research behind it and a contemporary story that pulls its own weight, The Things We Cannot Say is among the more satisfying entries in a crowded field.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — A masterfully structured dual-timeline novel that brings Nazi-occupied Poland to life with authenticity and compassion, anchored by a contemporary story that makes the past feel immediate and urgent.