The Rest is Silence
A young woman disappears. For eighty years, everyone believes they know why. They are wrong.
“Reading The Rest of Silence is like spending time with several of your favourite authors, all within one novel. The mystery element in a wartime Cotswold village is utterly intriguing, the patterns of life and the personalities observed with the eye of an Elizabeth Taylor or a Josephine Tey. The twenty-first century resolution is a convincing and beautifully-weighted exploration of women’s lives and their possibilities. Very highly recommended. ”
September 1939. At the outbreak of WWII, introspective schoolgirl Muriel Mead pushes her bicycle down a green lane and vanishes. Is she the victim of a brutal crime, or a young woman determined to escape a life already mapped out for her?
Half a century later, academic Cecilia Cardiff revisits the cold case. Drawing on family documents, local testimony and historical evidence, she concludes that Muriel was abducted and murdered by a reclusive neighbour. The case appears closed.
Until, during the 2020 lockdown, villager Seren Jones begins visiting ninety-six-year-old Hariet Head, a fiercely independent woman who lives self-sufficiently in the Welsh Marches. As their friendship grows, Hariet realises it’s time to reveal a secret she's carried for more than eighty years.
It is a story that challenges everything.
Told across companion narratives, The Rest is Silence presents Cecilia and Seren’s radically different accounts of what really happened to Muriel Mead. And, as each narrator searches for answers, their stories reveal not a neat singular truth but a fractured mosaic—coloured by their own convictions about choice, possibility, and the nature of knowing.
A cleverly conceived book that will leave readers in a brown study long after the final page .
— Kirkus star review
