You can purchase The Hush Sisters at Chapters Indigo, Breakwater Books, and Amazon (Canada, United States, and the United Kingdom and Ireland).
Sissy and Ava Hush are estranged, middle-aged sisters with little in common beyond their upbringing in a peculiar manor in downtown St. John’s.
With both parents now dead, the siblings must decide what to do with the old house they’ve inherited. Despite their individual loneliness, neither is willing to change or cede to the other’s intentions. As the sisters discover the house’s dark secrets, the spirits of the past awaken, and strange events envelop them. The Hush sisters must either face these sinister forces together or be forever ripped apart.
In The Hush Sisters, Gerard Collins weaves psychological suspense with elements of the fantastic to craft a contemporary urban Gothic that will keep readers spellbound until the novel whispers its startling secrets.
49TH SHELF “Utterly Fantastic Book for Fall — 2020”
Next Generation Indie Book — Winner, Suspense category
Next Generation Indie Book — Finalist, Paranormal category
Reviews and praise for The Hush Sisters
Gerard Collins’ novel The Hush Sisters is classic Atlantic Gothic, with a few more sub genres thrown in for good measure. I used to live very near to where the book is set. Cold shivers. But the whole city of St. John’s is brought creepily to life. The unhushable Hush Sisters will keep you up at night—just leave the lights on. Wicked and clever.
~ Wayne Johnston, author of First Snow, Last Light; The Colony of Unrequited Dreams; and Jennie’s Boy: A Newfoundland Childhood
Once it gets inside your head, there’s nothing quiet about Gerard Collins’ The Hush Sisters. It unsettles, it whispers, it lurks. It demands your attention, and you’re left with an impossible choice: to keep reading until the darkening drama is solved, or to savour it slowly and risk staying caught among the ghosts.
Deft suspense, taut writing, and a plot that grabs you and won’t let go; it drags you through one corner of a St. John’s neighbourhood and shows how much of a house is really just its façade. Once you start, you’re going into the walls. And that’s just the beginning.
~ Russell Wangersky, author of Walt and Whirl Away
I very much enjoyed The Hush Sisters. Darkly atmospheric and offering narrative twists to keep the reader off kilter, The Hush Sisters explores how evil lurks, in both psyche and shelter.
Collins artfully explores a brutal topic where internal and external landscapes mirror one another, and what is reflected through the stories of each of the Hush sisters has the power to both horrify and heal.
~ Carla Gunn, author of Amphibian
Getting lost in a book is always a joy, but falling into The Hush Sisters was a truly wonderful escape in a year like 2020. The fluctuating tension and love between Sissy and Ava Hush gives a real-world grounding to the eerie memories of their childhood and the unnerving presences lingering in their home.
With each new ghost, creepy space and heated argument, I became more invested in the dark drama. What did Ava want Sissy to know? What happened between Sissy and her husband? From where (or is it whom) did the house get its aura?
The Hush Sisters snagged me early on and had me gripped until the final pages.
~ Atlantic Books, Must-Have New Brunswick Books of 2020
The supernatural and the real come together with terrifying yet familiar chemistry within the rooms and walls of the house. There is a soft air of Austen here, two sisters struggling with what amounts to a fallen family’s estate, but Poe is never far from the light with the echoes of the dead and the images of lost faces in windows and behind closet doors. There is such a connection to stark reality here, that the spooky bits feel so real, so tangible, the reader can feel the chill rush through a room without warning, and then sense the dread to come.
There is more at work here than just the Gothic, and the reader is rewarded with a story that will surprise and frighten them, but also move them as they walk through this dark, beside the Sisters Hush.
~ Jeremy Thomas Gilmer, The East Mag, September 2020