The Rest is Silence
What happened to the most famous missing person in British History
The Rest is Silence follows the story of Muriel Mead, an introspective schoolgirl who disappears from a village lane on the eve of World War II.
Was she a victim or simply a young woman determined to live on her own terms?
Told across companion narratives, The Rest is Silence presents the radically different accounts of two women bound to Muriel by memory, longing, and loss. 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.
The Rest is Silence offers a thoughtfully crafted meditation about the stories we tell, the silences we keep, and what it means to live out of step with the mainstream.
What the author says
The Rest is Silence began years before I started writing it. I had an image in my head - a person is seen entering one end of a short green lane but never appears at the other. And that was it. While the image wouldn’t go away, I knew I didn’t want to write a crime novel. I wanted to explore questions of how we access and assess the truth. So I decided to write two books, one written in the style of a true crime, the other as a creative biography. When read side by side, these parallel ‘true’ accounts offer the reader a 360-degree view of the same story, out of which multiple truths emerge.
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“I read the book in two sittings, and weeks on I’m still thinking about it.”
Mistress Pieces
An experimental exploration of madness and love
The crash of her husband’s foot through the bedroom door shatters the narrator. Each broken part of the body and mind takes on a voice, expressing itself through ‘Mistress Pieces’, words scrawled on walls and odd scraps of paper, in search of healing damage ‘half a century in the making’. Framed within a queer love story, Mistress Pieces celebrates madness and its influence on contemporary political and personal relationships, encouraging us to embrace chaos as we seek a new paradigm for living.
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“Raw, uplifting and refusing definition”
Dark Star
Dark Star is a first novel of impressive calibre (Time Magazine, 1929)
Born under a dark star, Nancy Pringle, never knew her father’s identity, and was abandoned by her mother. The novel follows Nancy as she navigates adolescence and adulthood, while encountering society’s marginalised in her search both for her father and her self.
Under Lorna Moon’s forensic gaze, small community life's conventions and hypocrisies are examined in minute and wry detail. And through Nancy’s growing understanding of her own desire, Moon is able to analyse female sexuality at a time when to do so was revolutionary. ‘It is revolting to me’, Moon wrote in a letter, ‘that in a civilised world a woman’s virtue rests entirely upon her hymen.’* With Dark Star, Moon works through her outrage.
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