Kelly Rimmer

Kelly Rimmer is an Australian romance and historical fiction author whose The Things We Cannot Say — alternating between a contemporary American family and a young Polish couple during the Nazi occupation — became a major international bestseller.

Kelly Rimmer published several contemporary romance novels under the pen name Kelly Rimmer (her actual name) before The Things We Cannot Say (2019) reached an international audience significantly larger than her previous readership. The novel uses a dual-timeline structure: in the contemporary strand, an American woman travels to Poland to investigate her grandmother’s past at the grandmother’s urgent request; in the historical strand, set during the Nazi occupation of Poland, the grandmother’s story as a young woman is told directly.

The historical sections focus on a young Polish couple — Tomasz and Alina — whose love story unfolds against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust. The contemporary sections involve a family dealing with a non-verbal autistic child, whose needs and whose perspective become increasingly central to the novel’s emotional resolution. The combination of Holocaust history, wartime romance, and a contemporary family drama dealing with neurodiversity gives the book an unusually broad emotional range.

The novel sold millions of copies globally and became particularly popular among book clubs, for whom its multiple timelines and its treatment of disability and history provide substantial discussion material. Rimmer has continued publishing both contemporary romance and historical fiction. The Things We Cannot Say is her most accomplished and most widely read novel, and the one that demonstrated that her romance-writing skills could be applied to more ambitious historical material.