Channel Street Books has acquired Every Silent Thing, the debut novel by M.R. Madonna. The book will be published on October 13, 2026, in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats, with a paperback edition to follow in 2027.

Every Silent Thing opens before dawn on All Saints’ Day, with a mother trying to keep her son calm and a boy circling what he believes he caused, before asking the question that turns the whole book into a lit fuse: What if he lives? The novel then steps back six months, walking the reader one taut day at a time toward that morning.

Levi Tallon is thirteen when his family moves to the small Finger Lakes town of Willeran, where his mother grew up, for what is supposed to be a fresh start. It isn’t. His father’s drinking and violence follow them there. His devout mother, Maggie, keeps promising that God will change things. With the help of a hardened older boy named Doley, Levi begins planning the only solution he can imagine: to kill his father.

But Every Silent Thing has no easy monster to hate and no clean innocent to save. Levi’s father is a violent man, but also a haunted one, running from something he did years ago. Maggie’s faith is real, and so is her willingness to use it as a weapon for almost anything done in the name of keeping the family whole. And Levi wants to save his mother — but the way he chooses may be something he can’t undo. All three are guilty. The novel makes you understand them anyway, and refuses to let you feel clean about it.

Madonna builds the novel like a countdown, alternating between two distinct voices that never blur: Levi’s raw, snappish, unsentimental narration, and Maggie’s internal register, shaped by prayer, denial, and the lies she must believe. The novel’s three parts take their titles from the Lord’s Prayer — Give Us This Day, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, and Deliver Us from Evil — as faith, fear, and loyalty collapse into something far more volatile than devotion.

Early reviews single out the plot’s intricacy, emotional force, and moral unease. Kirkus Reviews calls Every Silent Thing “a dark and gripping small-town tale” where “secrets and lies take a fearsome toll …,” and places Madonna among “hardboiled masters like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett,” praising his ability to render difficult material “successfully yet sensitively.”

“What made us say yes wasn’t the plot — it was the nerve of it,” said Channel Street Books. “Madonna gives every member of this family a reason to be feared and a reason to be pitied. Nobody escapes judgment, but nobody is reduced to a villain either. That’s an extraordinarily difficult balance to strike, especially in a debut — and it marks Madonna as a real voice in neo-noir: controlled, unsentimental, and unmistakably his own.”

Publication updates, including preorder information and availability of review copies, will be shared on channelstreetbooks.com. For media inquiries, contact press@channelstreetbooks.com.