The Sea and the Silence

“A terrific novel. Moving and hugely entertaining.” - Roddy Doyle

"The Sea and the Silence is a love story, and a war story, and it's beautifully told in that lilting, low-key style that syncopates the work of so many great Irish writers, such as William Trevor, John McGahern and John Banville: 'As I stared, by one of those miracles of light, the sea shone as if all the silver of the world was buried just beneath its surface.'

The last 20 or so pages will hold you especially spellbound. You can sense what's going to happen but not how — and that, come to think of it, is the way it is with life itself. The end is inescapable: All of us eventually die. But what we do before that moment — whom we love, how we live — is the subject of this brutal, luminous, unforgettable book.

You think of yourself as a moderately well-read person. And then you come across a book so brilliant, so moving, so enchanting, by an author you had not even heard of, and

"A terrific novel. Moving and hugely entertaining." - Roddy Doyle

"The Sea and the Silence is a love story, and a war story, and it's beautifully told in that lilting, low-key style that syncopates the work of so many great Irish writers, such as William Trevor, John McGahern and John Banville: 'As I stared, by one of those miracles of light, the sea shone as if all the silver of the world was buried just beneath its surface.'

The last 20 or so pages will hold you especially spellbound. You can sense what's going to happen but not how -- and that, come to think of it, is the way it is with life itself. The end is inescapable: All of us eventually die. But what we do before that moment -- whom we love, how we live -- is the subject of this brutal, luminous, unforgettable book.

You think of yourself as a moderately well-read person. And then you come across a book so brilliant, so moving, so enchanting, by an author you had not even heard of, and your world is henceforth altered. You feel a bit like John Keats when he came across a translation of Homer that knocked him out: 'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.' "

-Julia Keller, The Chicago Tribune

A powerful novel from one of Ireland's best writers on the turbulent birth of a nation, and the lovers it divides. ?A terrific novel. Moving and hugely entertaining.” - Roddy Doyle Ireland 1945. Young and beautiful, Iz begins a life on the south-east coast with her new husband. As she settles in to try and make her life by the sea, circumstances that have brought Iz to Monument are shrouded in mystery. The war in Europe is over, and change is about to brush away the old order. Soaring across the decades that follow Ireland’s newly won independence, sweeping across the fierce class issues and battles over land ownership that once defined Irish society, The Sea and the Silence is an epic love story set inside the fading grandeur of the Anglo-Irish class.