The Silence is a great domestic type thriller/mystery that goes back and forth between two time frames, years apart. This was a really great read and it held my interest throughout.
Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is powerful, stunning, heart wrenching debut enlightens a shameful area of Australian history: separation of children from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. This sensitive subject reminds you of another emotional historical novel: ”Before we were yours” and the book’s mysterious, intense, layered and high tension atmosphere reminds you of Jane Harper’s novels.

It’s told in two different time frames: we’re moving back and forth between 1967 and 1997 to solve the pieces of the puzzle: a murder mystery layered with more secrets, lies, dysfunctional family issues, unhealthy marriage relations.

On 1997, Isla lives in a basement flat in Hackney, wakes up with a call in the middle of the night coming from his father from Sydney. His father tells him to come back to his childhood home because he’s accused of the murder: a 30 years old case: their neighbor Mandy. She had been presumed missing at 3 decades ago but now she is presumed death and Isla’s father Joe is the last person who had seen her alive!
Isla already deals with her own problems, suffering from alcoholism, loneliness, forces herself to fly back to her home to bring out the family secrets but you know the most important thing at those thriller stories: sometimes it’s better not to dig out the past because you are not ready to face what will come around and hit you against your face. Sometimes it’s better not to know. But eventually Isla needs to know if her father is capable to do something lethal and dangerous.

At the flashback parts of the novel, we learn more about both neighbors and their family dynamics. Isla’s mother Louisa and father Joe are immigrants from England and Louisa is already homesick as soon as they move their new place. But Joe seems he’s fine to adapt into his new life style.
And when we’re introduced with the neighbors: Mandy and Steve has unhealthy relationship and rocky, problematic marriage. Steve is a cop and his job is more demanding and compelling but he’s doing his best to take things in control and Mandy doesn’t want to have baby. Then we learn Steve’s involvement about separation of Aborigine babies and as secrets start coming out more wrecking and tragic events start to occur as well.

Overall: This is promising, thrilling, dark, heartfelt, poignant, remarkably emotional, impressive debut that I highly recommend. It gave me another reason to add more Aussie authors to my MOUNT TBR I’m using to rent for the vacationers on weekends.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins Publishers/William Morrow for sharing this thrilling ARC with me in exchange my honest review.

I liked this novel very much. I thought it flowed beautifully and appreciated the dry quality to the writing. The story will keep you interested and guessing. It reads a bit like true crime. The vibes and setting really transport you into the time this takes place. Really well done.

The Silence isn't a bad book. The writing is atmospheric, its (problematic) reveals are well constructed, and it does its best to try and tangle with some thorny issues around gender and race relations. However, it fumbles those issues in ways that re-inscribe the harmful and damaging thinking that perpetuate misogynistic understanding of intimate partner abuse and racist attitudes towards the so-called white man's burden.

Like many of its characters, it manages to skirt the sort of responsibility that would make it a bad book. It hates its women (again like all of the characters, male and female) but in a way that tries to blame the eras (1967 and 1997) being featured. The women, in turn, hate each other to curry favor with obviously abusive men--towards whom the women and the book extend an extraordinary amount of sympathy and empathy. The men can't help but be bad, and their badness is a very difficult burden for them to handle. Beyond the misogyny and abuse apologetics, the state-sanctioned abduction of Aboriginal children from their homes is used to create a redemptive narrative for several of the white characters.