Praised as “full of personality and touches of humour” by The Guardian and as “fascinating… nuanced and understanding” by The Observer, Layla AlAmmar’s 2019 The Pact We Made debuted in the UK to tremendous coverage, hailed as a Kuwaiti #MeToo novel that “asks us to reimagine the lives of modern Muslims as they struggle to reconcile the freedom of choice with the customs of their faith” (BBC Radio 3).
Now, Algonquin is thrilled to introduce AlAmmar to American audiences with her first novel in the U.S., SILENCE IS A SENSE (Publication Date: March 16, 2021; Hardcover; $25.95). Profound and life-affirming, this novel follows a mute Syrian refugee grappling with her experiences during the Syrian Civil War and as a refugee traveling through Europe as she is gradually and unwillingly drawn into the lives of her neighbors. “SILENCE IS A SENSE opens the door on lives we need to hear more about,” says Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring and A Single Thread. “Lyrical, moving, and revealing, it made me understand better the very human need for safety and contact.”
A young woman sits in her apartment in an unnamed English city, absorbed in watching the small dramas of her neighbors through their windows across the way. Traumatized into muteness after a long, devastating trip from war-torn Syria to the UK, she feels herself sinking deeper into isolation, moving between dreams, reality, and memories of her absent boyfriend, her family, and her homeland. At the same time, she begins writing for a magazine under the pseudonym “the Voiceless,” trying to explain the refugee experience without sensationalizing it—or revealing anything about herself. Gradually the boundaries of her world expand as she ventures to the corner store, to a gathering at a nearby mosque, and to the bookstore and laundromat. When an anti-Muslim hate crime rattles the neighborhood, she has to make a choice: Will she remain a voiceless observer, or become an active participant in a community that, despite her best efforts, is quickly becoming her own?
Born in the US and raised in Kuwait, Layla AlAmmar has written for The Guardian and ArabLit Quarterly, with short stories published in the Evening Standard, Quail Bell Magazine, the Red Letters St. Andrews Prose Journal, and Aesthetica Magazine. Having watched the Arab Spring unfold in early 2011 with a disquieting mix of hope and trepidation, she explains, “It seemed this revolution transcended the touchstones of conflict we’re used to—religion and sect, tribe and origin, liberal and conservative. It felt like a call for an uncompromising dignity that extended to all areas of life. And yet: what comes after the revolution? The question left me unnerved, confused, and almost unbearably sad. So I did what I always do: I put it to a story. Not to try and make sense of things—for there is, I think, no way of making sense of the horror humans are capable of inflicting on one another—but because I needed a repository for the thoughts and feelings that assailed me.”
A brilliant, poetic meditation on identity, memory and the speakability of trauma, SILENCE IS A SENSE explores what it means to be a refugee and to need asylum, and how fundamental human connection is to our survival.
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MY REVIEW:
Silence is a Sense is an utterly emotional and one of the most compelling novels I have read this year. I absolutely loved this book for the evocative themes that we all need to know about the complicated identity and harrowing trauma of being Muslim, a refugee, an immigrant, and when everything just feels taken from you that you lose your voice, and the eventual healing to find it again.
This profound novel is centered on a young refugee woman from war-torn Syria, who is traumatized into muteness. As we are drawn in to this fragment of her life, we become privee to her acute observations of her new community, her neighbors, and what is slowly becoming her new home. In that sense, as a refugee in a new country she mourns the loss of her old life and what was once the place she called home. In the process she writes under the pseudonym, “The Voiceless, where she depicts her experiences and journey from Syria to England.
Layla AlAmmar, a Kuwaiti writer and a citizen of the world, delivered giving voice to those whose lives have been upended due to violence and hatred, and seeking asylum to start a new life. A new life where they are able to experience freedom from hate, to glean happiness after escaping horrors, and the safety of being who you are without prejudice or judgement. Or did our protagonist just escape one violence and hatred for another?
This novel was truly a thought provoking book that is not to be missed.
This was simply brilliant.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Layla AlAmmar is a writer and academic from Kuwait. She has a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her short stories have appeared in the Evening Standard, Quail Bell Magazine, the Red Letters St. Andrews Prose Journal, and Aesthetica Magazine, where her story "The Lagoon" was a finalist for the 2014 Creative Writing Award. She was the 2018 British Council international writer in residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival. Her debut novel, The Pact We Made, was published in 2019. She has written for The Guardian and ArabLit Quarterly. She is currently pursuing a PhD on the intersection of Arab women's fiction and literary trauma theory.
PRAISE:
“A fierce novel. The prose is ferocious, the pace is ferocious and the beguiling central character, known as The Voiceless, conceals behind her inability—or reluctance—to speak, a striking, visceral intensity. Layla AlAmmar has skillfully woven a narrative of memory and grief with an illuminating social critique of the position of asylum seekers within contemporary British society. It is daring and devastating.”
—Fiona Mozley, Booker-finalist author of Elmet and Hot Stew
“Kuwaiti writer AlAmmar explores trauma and voicelessness through fragmented narrative form and a mute protagonist who has survived the war in Syria and is now living in isolation in the UK.”
—The Millions
“With a powerful prose, AlAmmar pens a story about a young woman traumatized into muteness after a dangerous trip from war-torn Syria to the UK.”
— Palm Beach Daily News
“Evocative… The conflicts over immigration and racism are brilliantly distilled, and they dovetail seamlessly with the narrator’s lyrical, increasingly defiant narration. Patient readers will find much to ponder.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Silence is a Sense opens the door on lives we need to hear more about. Lyrical, moving, revealing, it made me understand better the very human need for safety and contact.”
—Tracy Chevalier, bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring and A Single Thread
UK PRAISE FOR THE PACT WE MADE:
“[A] fascinating glimpse into the complex and contradictory life of a modern Kuwaiti woman... full of personality and touches of humour.”
—Guardian
“[A] fascinating debut ... nuanced and understanding.”
—Observer
“Set in contemporary Kuwait, AlAmmar asks us to reimagine the lives of modern Muslims as they struggle to reconcile the freedom of choice with the customs of their faith.”
—BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking
“So beautifully written and so important, and so cleverly crafted, it can’t be a debut. But it is.”
—Joanna Cannon
“A Kuwaiti #MeToo novel of muffled suffering and a bid for freedom—absorbing, brave and compelling.”
—Leila Aboulela
“Truthful and courageous, radical and lyrical. I loved it.”
—Hanan Al-Shaykh
“Brilliant book about the pressures of being a 30 year old unmarried woman in Kuwait—the struggle for modernity amidst patriarchal tradition—and the cultural failure to acknowledge trauma. What a debut.”
—Pandora Sykes
“The Pact We Made deals with one woman’s search for independence.”
—ELLE
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