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After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

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
Daily Mail
Wyld sympathetically explores the blight of war and violence on three generations of a working-class Australian family
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
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Superb first novel
The Times
Wyld has a feel for beauty and for the ugliness of inherited pain
The New Yorker
Filled with light and tragedy. This is a sad novel and lovely novel from a talented new writer
The Observer
It's a cauterising, cleansing tale, told with muscular writing
The Guardian
A stunning work from a brilliant new voice
Esquire
This adroit examination of loss, lostness and trauma is the beginning of great things
Independent
This jewel of a book
Grazia, Lauren Laverne
Author Evie Wyld
Narrator David Tredinnick
Duration 10 hours and 8 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781448156641
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Historical fiction
Availability GB, IE

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