After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by EvieWyld (Author)

New
Paperback
2010
$12.30

Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents' mistakes is how to make different ones of your own. Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family's beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbors and their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank. Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family's cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War. When war breaks out again, Leon must go from sculpting sugar figurines to killing young men as a conscript in the Vietnam War.

Synopsis

Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents' mistakes is how to make different ones of your own. Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family's beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbors and their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank. Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family's cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War. When war breaks out again, Leon must go from sculpting sugar figurines to killing young men as a conscript in the Vietnam War.

$12.30

Quantity

2 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 22 Apr 2010
ISBN 10: 0099535831
ISBN 13: 9780099535836
Book Overview: A beautiful debut novel about fathers and sons, and the things we struggle to say out loud by one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.
Prizes: Winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize 2009. Shortlisted for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2011 and Orange Award for New Writers 2010.

Media Reviews

Just sometimes, a book is so complete, so compelling and potent, that you are fearful of breaking its hold. This is one: a novel about (as its title might suggest) devastating damage and the humanity that, almost unfathomably, remains...with awesome skill and whiplash wit, Evie Wyld knits together past and present, with tension building all the time. In Peter Carey and Tim Winton, Australia has produced two if the finest storytellers working today. On this evidence, Wyld can match them both -- Stephanie Cross * Daily Mail *
Wyld sympathetically explores the blight of war and violence on three generations of a working-class Australian family -- Gabriel Byng * New Statesman *
Wyld's first novel is a remarkable achievement: a potent and compelling exploration of the connections between father and son, and the legacy of violence and repression * bookmunch.wordpress.com/ *
Superb first novel -- Kate Saunders * The Times *
Wyld has a feel for beauty and for the ugliness of inherited pain * The New Yorker *

Author Bio

Evie Wyld's debut novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, was shortlisted for the Impac Prize and awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second, All the Birds, Singing, won the Miles Franklin Prize, the Encore Prize and the EU Prize for Literature, and shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel awards. In 2013 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, having previously been named by the BBC as one of the twelve best new British writers. She lives in Peckham, where she runs the Review Bookshop.