The Hush Sisters

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.


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