Silent Language. (Original novel)

Silent Language is a light-hearted novel about two Washington, D.C., families who live together as one family after jointly buying a house. The characters, who include civil servants, attorneys, a journalist, and a housewife who translates poetry, are behind-the-scenes people in Washington--people with a small, unseen effect on events outside their own lives. The story explores communication below the surface--how, without words, people share information, how people know about feelings that aren't expressed, what happens when there is a conflict between what people say and what they don't say, and, in particular, how the members of the family are affected when one of them has an affair that she keeps secret.