In Between the Silences

In Between the Silences

In a faded Welsh seaside town, Richard Jenkins keeps to the edges of things. He works in a flower shop, rents a room with a bay window that looks out over the Irish Sea, and tries not to think too carefully about the court date waiting for him a month from now. The charge is assault. The details, when he lets himself remember them, never quite settle into the same shape twice.

Then Linda moves into the room above his. She is quiet, watchful, and paid for by the council. They share a kitchen, a staircase, and very little else, until the evenings begin to fill with small disturbances. A knock at the door that stops when he answers, a child on the pavement who is gone by the time he looks again, a silence in the house that feels heavier than absence. Richard tells himself these things have ordinary explanations. He is less sure about what he will say when he finally has to account for himself.

Set against the salt air and the long light of a coastal summer, In Between the Silences is a spare, unsettling novella about the versions of events we live with, and the ones that continue without us. For readers of Andrew Michael Hurley and Jon McGregor.