A Small Dark Quiet

“A bold attempt to portray the greyness of growing up without roots or identity, cast adrift in an uncomprehending and uncertain world.” Caroline Moorehead, Times Literary Supplement.

March, 1945. The ravaged face of London will soon bepainted with victory, but for Sylvie, the private battle for peace is justbeginning. When one of her twins is stillborn, she is faced with a consuminggrief for the child she never had a chance to hold. A Small Dark Quiet followsa mother as she struggles to find the courage to rebuild her life and care foran orphan whom she and her husband, Gerald, adopt two years later.

Born in a concentration camp, the orphan’s early yearsappear punctuated with frail speculations, opening up a haunting space thatdraws Sylvie to bring him into parallel with the child she lost. When she givesthe orphan the stillborn child’s name, this unwittingly entangles him in agrief he will never be able to console. His own name has been erased, hisorigins blurred. Arthur’s preverbal trauma begins to merge with the loss hecarries for Sylvie, released in nightmares and fragments of emerging memoriesto make his life that of a boy he never knew. He learns all about ‘that otherlittle Arthur’, yearning both to become him and to free himself from his ghost.He can neither fit the shape of the life that has been lost nor grow into theone his adopted father has carved out for him.

As the novel unfolds over the next twentyyears, Arthur becomes curious about his Jewish heritage, but fears what thismight entail – drawn towards it, it seems he might find a sense of communionand acceptance, but the chorus of persecutory voices he has internalisedbecomes too overwhelming to bear. He is threatened as a child with being sentback where he belongs but no one can tell him where this is. He wanders as anadult looking for purpose but is unable to find his place. Feeling an imposterboth at home and in the city, Arthur’s yearning for that sense of belongingechoes in our own time.

Meeting Lydia seems to offer Arthur theopportunity to recast himself, yet all too soon he is trapped in a repetitionof what he was trying to escape. A past he can neither recall nor forget liveson within him even as he strives to forge a life for himself. Survival, though, insists Arthur keeps searching and as he openshimself to the world around him, there are flashes of just how resilient thehuman heart can be.

Through Sylvie’s unprocessed grief and Arthur’sacute sense of displacement, A Small Dark Quiet explores howthe compulsion to fill the empty space death leaves behind ultimately makes thedevastating void more acute. Yet however frail, the instinct for empathy and hopepersists in this powerful story of loss, migration and the search forbelonging.