Every Silent Thing had a longer road to publication than most debut novels. It drew interest from more than 30 literary agents, was represented by Janklow & Nesbit and Trident Media—two of the country’s top literary agencies—reached serious conversations with editors at Penguin/Ballantine, St. Martin’s Press, Little, Brown, and other major houses, and publishes October 13, 2026, under the Channel Street Books imprint. We spoke with M.R. Madonna about the path that nearly broke the novel, and what he had to do to get it right.
You seem a bit exhausted.
[laughs] I think the more accurate description is beaten.
Beaten? Come on. From where I’m sitting, this looks more like rising from the ashes.
Maybe. But winning an uphill battle doesn’t always feel exhilarating, you know? Sometimes it just feels like you finally stopped climbing. Exhaustion is the cousin to catharsis, I’d say. I just haven’t felt the catharsis part yet.
To go back to the beginning, the headline on this piece promises a story about top literary agents competing for your book. But that’s not the whole story.
It’s the beginning of the story. The interest was real—and as exciting as it was validating. But what came after that is the part worth talking about.
You were at Janklow & Nesbit first. What happened there?
The agent had a vision for the book that wasn’t mine. At the time, I didn’t trust myself enough. I deferred to his experience, to what seemed more marketable, to what was moving in the industry then. I went along with it longer than I should have—about fifteen months of revision—and by the end I realized I wasn’t driving anymore. I was in the passenger seat, moving farther and farther from the story I loved. So I made the difficult choice to part ways and start over, which meant undoing almost all of what I’d been talked into and finding my way back to the book I actually wanted to write. It took me embarrassingly long to admit that to myself.
What was the disconnect?
In hindsight, I think he understood pieces of it, but not the whole. The alternating points of view between an adult and a child. The dual storyline of the boys planning to kill, and the deeper story of what shaped the mother and father into who they are. His instinct was to simplify it: focus on the boys’ murder plot, with the mother and father as cleaner villains, or go the other way and make it a coming-of-age story about the boys’ relationship. I understand why those versions seemed more marketable. They might even have worked as different books. But they weren’t this book. The moment you choose either one, you lose the point.
What’s the point you lose?
Depth. Moral complexity. The whole reason the book exists. If you make anyone a pure villain, you’ve handed the reader a trope instead of a human being. Every character in Every Silent Thing is guilty of something—and justified by something—sometimes in the same breath. The boys think they’re righting wrongs, doing what they need to do to survive their parents. The parents are operating from a version of the same logic. That mirror is what the novel runs on. Without both threads, you have a straight line from problem to resolution. With both, you have something that makes you question your own morals—and sometimes catch yourself rooting for the wrong person or sympathizing with someone you shouldn’t. That’s where any story gets its pulse, I think—from those layers, from the ambiguity of our emotions, from characters who keep complicating what you thought you believed.
“Every character in Every Silent Thing is guilty of something—and justified by something—sometimes in the same breath.”
After Janklow, you queried again and chose another top agency from more than thirty interested agents. That’s a significant number.
It told me the story had something real. That it could find its audience. The agency I ended up signing with had serious reach, and the momentum there felt different. We had serious interest from major publishers—Penguin/Ballantine, St. Martin’s, Little, Brown, among others. And then COVID happened.
At that point, what did the publishing path actually look like on paper?
My agent was pretty blunt and a bit grim about the market going into COVID. Publishers were backlogged, cautious, and the pipeline was jammed. Realistically, we were looking at upwards of three years from submission to deal, then another eighteen months of pre-publication lead time before the book would reach readers. About a year into that window, I decided to rewrite every line and add back the scenes that had been cut. I wanted to build the version of the book I’d wanted from the start. I figured I had a rare window to do that while the industry was stalled. By the end, I’d have two versions in hand: one publishers thought they wanted, and one they didn’t know they wanted yet.
That process sounds like it led directly to the title.
The earlier version was called Son of October. As I reworked it, I realized the book wasn’t just about a boy and his mother. It was about what nobody was saying. Silence takes many shapes in this book—as weapon, protection, self-preservation, and complicity. Every character is keeping something quiet and convincing themselves it’s the right thing to do. That’s what the title had to carry. Every Silent Thing isn’t one secret. It’s all of them.
“Every Silent Thing isn’t one secret. It’s all of them.”
The book is told in alternating points of view—a mother and her thirteen-year-old son. That gave some people pause.
The concern was how to market a book where half the narrative lives inside a thirteen-year-old’s head. The solution being proposed was to pull back from his point of view, center the book on the mother, and make it a cleaner adult psychological thriller. But that would have meant compromising the thing that makes the book what it is. Levi’s chapters are the engine. He’s old enough to observe, but not old enough to understand the full meaning of what he’s seeing. That gap is where the whole novel lives. You pull that out, and you have a different book.
After everything it took to get here, what do you want from a reader when they put this down?
The book ends. The questions don’t. I want readers to close it unsure whose side they were on—and wondering if it’s even possible to pick one. Every character in this book has done something wrong and believed it was justified. Every character is understandable, which isn’t the same as innocent. That tug-of-war is intentional. If I made that feel real, I got everything right. That’s the only thing I was ever trying to do.
