Published by Unbound, 4 Dec 2018
A Small dark Quiet
Available in paperback and eBook. Audiobook exclusive on Audible.
Listen to an extract from A Small Dark Quiet here.
"A Small Dark Quiet is a bold attempt to portray the greyness of growing up without roots or identity, cast adrift in an uncomprehending and uncertain world.” Times Literary Supplement, Caroline Moorehead
March, 1945. The ravaged face of London will soon be painted with victory, but for Sylvie the private battle for peace is only just beginning. Revealing strength and small acts of kindness in the most unlikely places, she finds the courage to face loss – both her own, and that of the orphan born in a concentration camp whom she and her husband, Gerald, adopt two years later. Haunted by the gaps in the orphan’s history, Sylvie begins to draw him into parallel with her stillborn child. When she gives the orphan this child’s name, Arthur, she unwittingly entangles him in a grief he will never be able to console.
A Small Dark Quiet explores how the compulsion to fill the empty space that death leaves can, ultimately, only make the sense of such a devastating void more acute. Yet the search for home and the instinct to love and connect persists in this story of loss, migration and the ways in which we find ourselves caught between the need to feel safe and the will to be free.
Discover Miranda’s first novel, Starlings
Praise for A Small Dark Quiet
““A Small Dark Quiet is a bold attempt to portray the greyness of growing up without roots or identity, cast adrift in an uncomprehending and uncertain world.” ”
“In A Small Dark Quiet, Miranda Gold’s force is her concentration on ordinary darkness, the banal, yet ruthless effects of war and trauma on the everyday... in keeping with [a] focus on the intimate life of a family.”
“A Small Dark Quiet is a powerful exploration of trauma and the need to belong. The experience of reading Miranda Gold's latest novel resembles that of listening to a symphony. With harmonies and dissonances, with thematic variations and repetitions she sweeps the reader off their feet, takes us on a journey of post-war soul searching and eventually releases us back into everyday life slightly changed."
– Meike Ziervogel, author of MAGDA and founder of Peirene Press