When No One Is Watching Summary
Alyssa Cole

When No One Is Watching Overview

Alyssa Cole’s novel When No One Is Watching is a contemporary thriller in which a Black community fights to survive the hostile gentrification of their fictional Brooklyn neighborhood, Gifford Place. Cole uses the alternating first-person perspectives of Sydney, a Black woman who grew up in the neighborhood, and Theo, a white man who just moved in, to uncover a pharmaceutical company’s sinister involvement in the violent displacement of Gifford Place residents. Cole grapples with themes of racism, gentrification, gaslighting, and community in a modern Hitchcockian reckoning with America’s racial transgressions.