2009 novel by Evie Wyld
After the Fire, A Still Small Voice is thedebut novel by English authorEvie Wyld, published in 2009. It won theJohn Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for theInternational Dublin Literary Award.
The story is set inQueensland[1] on the East Coast of Australia and concerns two men from different generations, as described in theblurb on the back cover of the 2010Vintage edition:
- Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family's beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbours and their precocious young daughter Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank.
- Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family's cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of theKorean War. When war breaks out again, Leon must go from sculpting sugar figurines to killing young men as a conscript in theVietnam War.
Title and publication
[edit]The book's title is taken from1 Kings 19:12.[2]
The novel was published in 2009 byJonathan Cape in the UK andPantheon in the US.[citation needed]
- Lee Rourke inThe Independent on Sunday writes: "Landscape plays a major role in Wyld's writing. It opens up the narrative, creating an eerie metaphorical space, or silence, between each character, mirroring the physical and mental fissures that separate each generation. Although nothing is truly silent: even the landscape is "thick with insect noise". The power of this mesmerising novel hangs on the premise that silence is impossible, while such impossibility forces the men who litter its landscape to desire it all the more." and Rourke concludes: "Wyld's writing is assured enough to elongate metaphor and symbolism, creating a novel both taut and otherworldly. This adroit examination of loss, lostness and trauma is the beginning of great things".[3]
- The Observer has the following praise fromFrancesca Segal, "The landscape of Australia's east coast looms large in the book, wild and sinister, filled with light and tragedy. This is a sad and lovely novel from a talented new writer".[1]
- The New Yorker praises the novel: "Wyld has a feel both for beauty and for the ugliness of inherited pain. The mood is creepy—strange creatures in the sugar cane, grieving neighbors, a missing local girl—and the sentiment is plain: 'Sometimes people aren't all right and that's just how it is.'"[4]
After the Fire, A Still Small Voice won theJohn Llewellyn Rhys Prize[5] and aBetty Trask Award.[6]
It was shortlisted for both theOrange Award for New Writers[7] and theInternational Dublin Literary Award.[8]
