A History of Silence

From New Zealand's greatest living writer, A History of Silence is a moving and devastating memoir unlike any you have ever read before.

A History of Silence is a book about a country and a broken landscape. It's about the devastation in Christchurch, after the 2011 earthquake. It's about how easily we erase stories we find inconvenient. It's about the fault lines which that cataclysmic event opened up in Lloyd Jones' understanding of his own family history.

In A History of Silence Jones embarks on a quest for the truth about his family. What happened? Why do there seem to be so few stories? Why are there so few mementos? The answers he finds are completely unexpected and change everything.

Lloyd Jones was born in New Zealand in 1955. His best-known novel is Mister Pip, which won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the 2008 Kiriyama Prize Fiction Category, the 2008 Montana Award for Readers Choice, the Montana Fiction Award and the Montana Medal for Fiction or Poetry. It was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and has been made into a major feature film, directed by Andrew Adamson. His other books include Hand Me Down World, The Book of Fame, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance and Biografi. He has also published a collection of short stories, The Man in the Shed. Lloyd Jones lives in Wellington.

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'Lloyd Jones is a master storyteller.' Weekend Australian

'Jones is a daring writer who can be relied on to ignore expectation, and is becoming one of the most interesting, honest and thought-provoking novelists working today.' Guardian

'It would be difficult to think of another novelist as original or fearless as...Lloyd Jones.' Monthly

'Poetically observed detail and an affecting evocation of the past will reward readers interested in the way our history (even, or especially, that which we don't know about) can shape us.' Bookseller and Publisher