Number, Please
A Novel of the Telephone Exchange, 1942

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Corwin, Ohio, March 1942. The men who managed and mended the telephone exchange have gone to war, and the twelve women at the switchboard now carry the whole town's voice through a wall of brass jacks and braided cords. Ruth Ann Doyle is twenty-four, quick, careful and sworn to silence. She hears every proposal, every argument and every bit of bad news in Corwin, and she repeats none of it.

Then a telegram about a missing flier is delivered to the wrong family, and one evening on the line Ruth Ann overhears something worse on the party line: a plan to steal rationed fuel from the people who can least afford to lose it. If she speaks, she breaks the one promise that holds her job and her friendships together. If she stays quiet, someone she has connected a thousand times will pay for it.

With a chief operator who has run the board since the first war, a night girl who never says what she is really afraid of, and a company in the city ready to close their small exchange for good, Ruth Ann has to find out what a person owes the town that trusts her with its secrets.

A warm, absorbing story of friendship, courage and the women who kept a country talking. A novel of the home front.