A Writer of Literary Fiction
Two novels about the long cost of the things we do not say.
About
Cyrus Behn writes literary fiction about silence — about what families inherit and refuse to name, about the moral architecture of the things we do not say. His novels follow the long cost of unspoken decisions: an immigrant surgeon who carries his mother’s discipline of silence into a life that will not survive it; a marriage running on a husband’s private accounting; a woman whose interior nobody has been listening to for nine years.
His work has been compared to Khaled Hosseini, Hernan Diaz, and Min Jin Lee. He lives between languages and continents, and writes about the rooms most American novels do not open the doors of.
He counted the women. He counted the buzzes. He counted, one February evening, exactly what it would take.
He told himself he was thinking about a clinical scenario.
— The Terms
The Books
A Novel · 2026
An open marriage. A silent bleed. Margot Vale is thirty-six, an emergency physician three days a week and a textile conservator two — her “breathing days,” spent in a museum basement undoing a previous restorer’s confident repairs to a seventeenth-century tapestry.
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A Novel · 2026
“She said she wanted nothing.” A boy who crossed a border at fourteen becomes a surgeon at the best cancer hospital in the country. Then a phone call between lunch and clinic introduces him to the daughter he was promised would never exist. A novel about silence as inheritance, and the long cost of believing the thing you wanted to believe.
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