The Hearing Test

By: Eliza Barry Callahan

Narrated by: Eliza Barry Callahan

When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late 20s, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the spectre of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year – a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned – while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog.

Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters – with neighbours, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians and philosophers – making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival.

At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalising intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major literary writer with a rare command of form, compression and intent.

©2024 Eliza Barry Callahan (P)2024 Highbridge, a division of Recorded Books

Critic reviews

'Over the course of a year in New York City, an artist goes deaf. She records her life as her hearing slips away, reflecting on silence, art, and record-keeping itself in this meditative novel.' (The New York Times Book Review)

'Both meditative and deliciously funny ... masterfully-observed.' (Vanity Fair)

'Heartbreak and hearing loss are either symbols for each other or paired expressions of something deeper: a fundamental out-of-tune-ness that is beguilingly present in Callahan's style ... [B]reathtakingly crafted.' (The New Yorker)

'[The Hearing Test] has a loosely structured feel, often to delightful effect. There are numerous brilliant scenes of the narrator navigating her new life.' (The Guardian)