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Table of Contents
About the Book
On the morning a powerful US senator is accused of a long-buried sexual scandal, his son Harris wakes to a world suddenly unrecognizable.
A journalist, husband, and father, Harris has built his life on reason, responsibility, and restraint. But as headlines spread and reputations unravel, he is pulled back into the unresolved gravity of his childhood—into memories of political ambition, parental absence, and a father whose public idealism shaped Harris’s private life in ways he is only beginning to understand.
Opening on a single charged day—as Harris navigates work, marriage, parenthood, and a culture hungry for judgment—Judah Can’t Tell becomes a powerful meditation on power, consent, masculinity, and moral inheritance. What do we owe the people we love when the truth threatens to destroy them? And what do we owe our children when silence feels safer than honesty?
Written with emotional acuity and moral clarity, Judah Can’t Tell is a timely, deeply human novel about reckoning—personal, political, and generational.
A journalist, husband, and father, Harris has built his life on reason, responsibility, and restraint. But as headlines spread and reputations unravel, he is pulled back into the unresolved gravity of his childhood—into memories of political ambition, parental absence, and a father whose public idealism shaped Harris’s private life in ways he is only beginning to understand.
Opening on a single charged day—as Harris navigates work, marriage, parenthood, and a culture hungry for judgment—Judah Can’t Tell becomes a powerful meditation on power, consent, masculinity, and moral inheritance. What do we owe the people we love when the truth threatens to destroy them? And what do we owe our children when silence feels safer than honesty?
Written with emotional acuity and moral clarity, Judah Can’t Tell is a timely, deeply human novel about reckoning—personal, political, and generational.
Appearances
OCT 29
7:00PM
Books & Books
265 Aragon Ave
Coral Gables, FL 33134
DEC 8
7:30PM
In Person
Cal Hoffman
Reading, signing, Q&A
Warwick's
7812 Girard Ave
La Jolla, CA 92037
About the Author
Cal Hoffman is the author of Easy to Slip, the acclaimed debut novel. He graduated from Catholic University and attended Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London and the MFA Fiction Writing Program at Columbia University. He taught English and creative writing, and as an actor performed in regional theater across the country, starring in the acclaimed New York revival of Jules Feiffer's play, Elliot Loves. Cal lives with his wife, Victoria Leacock Hoffman, and their son, Harry, in Washington, DC.
Product Details
- Publisher: Rare Bird Books (November 10, 2026)
- Length: 352 pages
- ISBN13: 9781644285770
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Raves and Reviews
"Judah Can't Tell is a morally urgent novel about fatherhood, ambition, and the long shadow of inherited failure. Cal Hoffman's Harris Belkind is one of the most scrupulously rendered American men I've encountered in recent fiction—alive on every page, and unable, finally, to look away from himself."
– John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner and The Red Daughter
"Judah Can't Tell is a powerful reminder that scandal is just the detonation that occurs when the inconvenient truth hits the light. And that the reason we can never truly escape the past is because we are its creation. Intimate and intense, Cal Hoffman's Judah Can't Tell is a page-turner that speaks directly to the moment."
– Mat Johnson, author of Invisible Things
"Judah Can't Tell is the timeliest of political-intrigue thrillers. It is also a first-rate piece of work—emotionally charged, psychologically penetrating, and almost unbearably exciting."
– Lili Anolik, author of Didion & Babitz
"In these fraught times, a book about a fictional political scandal might seem a faint echo of the daily news, but in Cal Hoffman's masterful Judah Can't Tell, a long-buried sex scandal bursts into furious light, and—thanks to Hoffman's nuanced insight and muscular prose—it all feels vitally new. He's written a bracing moral parable for a nation on edge"
– Doug Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of I Am My Own Wife
"Judah Can't Tell is a compassionate, timely political novel about fathers and sons. Cal Hoffman writes with authority and grace and I stayed up way too late finishing this insightful novel, all the while questioning my assumptions and greedily turning pages"
– Joanna Hershon, author of Saint Ivo
"Cal Hoffman has written a novel that speaks to our fraught times—a journalist grappling with his U.S. senator father scandalized by long ago accusations of sexual misconduct. With a sure grasp of the landscape and political culture of the nation's capital, Cal Hoffman adroitly explores the never ending tensions between truth, loyalty and love."
– Michael Isikoff, author of Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story and co-author of Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump
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