We Hear Voices takes place in a near future in London where Rachel Jackman lives with her boyfriend Al, their baby, Beth, and her young son, Billy. Her teenaged daughter, Nina, used to split her time between Rachel and her ex-husband, Henry, but since Billy caught the J5X virus, currently ravaging the world with no vaccine, Nina was sent to stay with her dad. Billy is currently on his literal deathbed and Rachel has decided to shed the protective mask and suit to spend time holding her 6 year old son as he dies, pleading with whatever forces are out there to save him at any cost. Then a miracle happens and Billy takes a turn for the better.
His recovery is shocking and very rare, but Rachel isn't about to question things. As Billy rapidly improves, she notices a definite change in him - he is talking to an imaginary friend he calls Delfy and she is very curious about the world around Billy and his family. Rachel and Al chalk it up to him coping with a near-death experience, but then Delfy starts compelling Billy to do strange things like rearrange the kitchen and box up thousands of spiders as a gift to his mom - Rachel is terrified of spiders. One day while visiting Rachel's mom, Orla, she lies about chocolate being in the house and Billy/Delfy "punishes" Orla by strangling her, only to be saved by Rachel. This behavior escalates until Billy finds himself in jail for murder.
Across town, Professor Graham Watson runs a super-secret underground hospital that houses a handful of children who recovered from J5X just like Billy and, just like Billy, their voices drove them to murder. He is studying them and trying to cure them, with little success. His beloved wife, Imogen, recently passed from J5X, yet she still appears to him as a ghost helping in his work. When Graham hears about Billy, he agrees to take him into his hospital rather than the boy waiting in jail until his trial. Actually, Graham tried to get Rachel to let Billy live there prior to the murder so he could get the needed treatment (and prevent something terrible from happening), but she didn't believe his behavior would turn deadly until it did.
There is lots more going on, including a real estate magnate named Ben Alford who is buying up all of the cheap housing and getting people to work for his company, Starcom, for free in exchange for their housing, food and clothing. He calls it worklifeplus. Starcom is also at the forefront of space pioneering and Nina, as a would-be astronaut, hopes to someday live and work on "the Rock," an asteroid Starcom has harnessed and is bringing closer to Earth to serve as an interim point before setting off to colonize another planet, since Earth is all but a lost cause. During Space Skills classes, Nina meets Louis Ricci, a handsome, wealthy boy who is not what he appears to be. Meanwhile, Al works with the homeless and is constantly railing against Ben Alford and his company, although he and Rachel's housing situation is so tenuous, he may be forced to go work there just to put a roof over their heads.
There is a lot of interconnectivity going on in We Hear Voices, and while it does come together in the end, it felt like it took a long time to get there. I also found it a bit hard to feel sorry for Rachel when she was a former attorney who gave up her stressful career to be a receptionist. While I understand stressors, if your family is on the brink of homelessness and you have children to worry about, I kind of felt like she needed to suck it up and just go back to work to get them out of their current situation.
All in all, We Hear Voices is an intriguing concept, but I feel like, personally, I had Covid exhaustion and just didn't really want to read about a pandemic as an escape from the pandemic currently happening. While the timing of Evie Green's book release couldn't be less fortunate, I still found it to be just okay and not great.
