The Operator by Gretchen Berg
Available Now
William Morrow
“Think The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in the suburbs with delicious
turns of jealousy, infidelity, bigotry, and embezzlement thrown in
for good measure. The Operator is irresistible!"
— Kathryn Stockett, author of the New York Times bestselling
novel The Help
A clever, surprising, and ultimately moving debut novel, set in a
small Midwestern town in the early 1950s, about a nosy switchboard operator
who overhears gossip involving her own family, and the unraveling that discovery sets into
motion.
In a small town, everyone knows everyone else’s business . . .
Nobody knows the people of Wooster, Ohio, better than switchboard operator Vivian Dalton,
and she’d be the first to tell you that. She calls it intuition. Her teenage daughter, Charlotte, calls
it eavesdropping.
Vivian and the other women who work at Bell on East Liberty Street connect lines and lives.
They aren’t supposed to listen in on conversations, but they do, and they all have opinions on
what they hear—especially Vivian. She knows that Mrs. Butler’s ungrateful daughter, Maxine,
still hasn’t thanked her mother for the quilt she made, and that Ginny Frazier turned down yet
another invitation to go to the A&W with Clyde Walsh.
Then, one cold December night, Vivian listens in on a call between that snob Betty Miller and
someone whose voice she can’t quite place and hears something shocking. Betty Miller’s
mystery friend has news that, if true, will shatter Vivian’s tidy life in Wooster, humiliating her and
making her the laughingstock of the town.
Vivian may be mortified, but she isn’t going to take this lying down. She’s going to get to the
bottom of that rumor—get into it, get under it, poke around in the corners. Find every last bit.
Vivian wants the truth, no matter how painful it may be.
But as Vivian is about to be reminded, in a small town like Wooster, one secret usually leads to
another. . . .
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