Set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s, The Quiet Whispers Never Stop is a story of love, obsession and escape, an uncompromising, lyrical tour-de-force that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new voice in Irish fiction

AN IRISH EXAMINER BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BUTLER LITERARY AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE KATE O'BRIEN AWARD

'Touching and darkly beautiful' Irish Sunday Independent
'Powerful, uncompromising' Irish Times
'Utterly absorbing, a novel that keeps you guessing right to the end' Kit de Waal

1982. Northern Ireland. Nuala Malin is tied to a life she doesn't want by her daughter Sam and baby son PJ. An affair with a seventeen-year-old boy reminds her of a future she hasn't given up on, but it can't last, and when her chance to leave comes, she takes it.

1994. If Sam Malin has a god then it is Kurt Cobain. Music is the only thing that brings her peace. She wants a life away from the North and its troubles, away from her da who can't talk about the past but seems stuck there, waiting for Sam's mother to return. A mother Sam barely knew.

Escape seems out of reach until Sam meets a jagged, magnetic older man, drawn to him in a way she can't yet comprehend.

She falls for him, unable to say no.

Sam is more like her mother than she knows.