The Quality of Silence

Starred review from December 21, 2015
Astrophysicist Yasmin Alfredson, the heroine of this heart-stopping page-turner from bestseller Lupton (Afterwards), makes a desperate gamble to save her marriage and flies with her deaf 10-year-old daughter, Ruby, from their home in London to Alaska, where her husband, Matt, a wildlife filmmaker, has been shooting in a remote area north of the Arctic Circle. At the airport in Fairbanks, police tell a stunned Yasmin that Matt is dead, one of two dozen victims of a freakish fire that wiped out the Inuit hamlet where he was based. But in the absence of identifiable remains, she isn’t buying it, and even in the face of a looming winter storm, she resolves to get herself and Ruby, whom she has managed to keep somewhat shielded from the news (despite what the girl can glean from lip reading), the almost 500 miles on a two-lane ice road to hunt for her husband. Lupton limns a starkly beautiful story at once as expansive as the aurora borealis and as intimate as a mother and daughter finally learning to truly hear each another. Agent: Felicity Blunt, Curtis Brown.

January 1, 2016

Astrophysicist Yasmin and Ruby, her precocious deaf daughter, fly from Scotland to Alaska to visit Ruby's father, a wildlife photographer. Yasmin intends to tell her husband to come home or risk losing their marriage, but when she lands, she learns that the remote village where Matt has been living has been devastated by fire and all its residents are presumed dead. A disbelieving Yasmin and Ruby set out into the depths of the Alaskan winter to find the village and rescue Matt. Yasmin soon realizes that they are caught in the midst of a horrendous storm, with limited supplies, dwindling battery power, and questionable fuel. With no one on the road to help, they press on, terrified. Narrated in the alternating voices of Yasmin and Ruby, Lupton's (Sister; Afterwards) third novel is nail-bitingly suspenseful and chilling. Not only is the Arctic landscape inhospitable, but human-made dangers loom that are equivalently deadly. VERDICT Lupton demonstrates her mastery of the suspense genre in this dazzling tale of human resilience that evokes the stories of Jack London. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]--Susan Clifford Braun, Bainbridge Island, WA

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