Where to Start with Kelly Rimmer: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Kelly Rimmer — how to approach The Things We Cannot Say, her dual-timeline novel of Nazi-occupied Poland and the family secrets preserved by a grandmother's silence. A complete reading guide.
Kelly Rimmer is an Australian author who has written extensively in the dual-timeline historical fiction space, with a particular focus on World War II narratives that centre the experiences of women and families rather than military operations. The Things We Cannot Say (2019) was published by MIRA and became her breakthrough work internationally — a novel that combines meticulous research into Nazi-occupied rural Poland with a contemporary storyline that gives the historical narrative personal urgency for a modern reader.
Where to Start: The Things We Cannot Say (2019)
The essential Kelly Rimmer — and one of the most carefully constructed dual-timeline World War II novels of the past decade. The Things We Cannot Say opens in the present: Alice Michaels, managing a household with a demanding job, a strained marriage, and a son with autism whose needs structure every family decision, receives news that her grandmother Babcia has had a stroke. In the hospital, Babcia — who has never spoken of her life in Poland, who arrived in America after the war and sealed her past — begins whispering names that no one in the family recognises. Tomasz. Aleksy. A life before the life her family knew.
Alice’s mother cannot travel to Poland. Alice, exhausted and already at capacity, finds herself on a plane to Trzebinia.
The historical thread follows Alina, a young Polish woman in 1939, in the months before the Nazi occupation of her village and through the years that follow. Rimmer’s research into the occupation of rural Poland is specific and thorough — not the broad-stroke horror of the cities but the gradual, particular way the occupation arrives in a small village, the way compliance and resistance coexist in the same household, the specific calculations made by people trying to protect children and neighbours while surviving themselves.
Alina’s relationship with Tomasz is the emotional centre of the wartime narrative — not a romance in the comfortable sense but a study of what two people who love each other are capable of doing and choosing when circumstances exceed what love alone can address. Rimmer understands that wartime choices are not cleanly heroic or cowardly. They are made under pressure, with incomplete information, by people whose resources have been stripped to nothing. The novel does not ask its readers to judge those choices; it asks them to understand them.
The contemporary thread earns its place more fully than it might initially seem. Alice’s life — her son Eddie’s autism and its demands on every family system, the specific fatigue of a marriage stretched thin by care obligations, her own sense of a self that has been subordinated to the management of others’ needs — is handled with genuine insight. Eddie is a person in the novel, not a narrative device designed to establish Alice’s capacity for empathy. The patience that Alice must bring to Eddie’s world is the same quality she brings, eventually, to understanding her grandmother’s.
The title is the book’s thesis. Babcia’s silence was not only about pain, shame, or trauma. Rimmer arrives at a more complex answer: some things cannot be said because language is insufficient for them, and some silences are acts of love rather than concealment — choices to spare the people you love from knowledge that would be a burden rather than a gift. Understanding this does not make the weight of inherited silence lighter. It makes its origins comprehensible.
The emotional impact of the novel’s ending is earned through accumulation — through the careful construction of two lives that the reader has understood from the inside, so that when they converge the convergence carries the weight of two complete human histories rather than just the revelation of plot.
Reading Kelly Rimmer
The Things We Cannot Say is Rimmer’s most widely read and most emotionally accomplished novel. It stands alone and requires no prior reading.
For the full Kelly Rimmer bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Kelly Rimmer author page on Editors Reads.
Affiliate disclosure: Links to Amazon on this page are affiliate links. We earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Kelly Rimmer?
The Things We Cannot Say (2019) is Rimmer's essential book — a dual-timeline novel that moves between Nazi-occupied rural Poland in 1939–1942 and contemporary America, as Alice investigates the family secrets her grandmother Babcia has guarded since the war. Among the most affecting World War II novels of recent years, earning its emotional devastation through careful historical research and a contemporary storyline that grounds the wartime narrative in urgent personal stakes.
What is The Things We Cannot Say about?
When Alice's grandmother Babcia has a stroke and begins whispering unknown names — Tomasz, Aleksy — Alice travels to Poland to uncover a history that was never shared. The novel alternates with Alina's story in 1939–1942 Poland, where Nazi occupation transforms a love story into a series of impossible choices. The book is ultimately about the silences families carry across generations and the love that motivates them — protecting others from knowledge that would be a burden rather than a gift.
Is The Things We Cannot Say a romance novel?
The Things We Cannot Say has romantic elements in both timelines, but it is primarily historical fiction — the wartime romance between Alina and Tomasz is the vehicle for a serious examination of life under Nazi occupation. Rimmer's thorough research into the occupation of rural Poland is the book's backbone, and the romance elements, while present, serve the larger story of survival, choice, and family silence rather than driving it.
What should I read after The Things We Cannot Say?
After The Things We Cannot Say, Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale covers Nazi-occupied France through a dual female perspective with comparable emotional force and historical detail. Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See approaches WWII from an unusual dual perspective — a French girl and a German boy — with the most literary prose in the genre. Heather Morris's The Tattooist of Auschwitz brings similar dual-timeline structure to a specifically Polish wartime story.
