Music and silence

by Anne Redmon

In a slightly shabby house in a once-genteel section of London, two women meet. Each is scarred by emotional wounds suffered in childhood. Each has cut herself off from ordinary existence. Maud - who is music - is a twenty-six-year-old cellist in retreat from a highly promising career after a disastrous love affair with her teacher and mentor. Beatrice - who is silence - is a forty-year-old physician drawn out of her self-imposed, saintlike isolation by Maud's predicament. Into their lives comes Arthur, a half-crazed religious fanatic, bringing with him destruction wrought in the name of God, as he inexorably propels this rich and compelling novel to its shocking conclusion.

Genres: Fiction

252 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Anne Redmon is a novelist, journalist, and creative writing educator with a rich and varied career spanning several decades. She has published seven novels, including the acclaimed Emily Stone, which won the Yorkshire Post Prize for a first work, and Music and Silence, which has been translated into several languages and included in the American Penguin Classics series. Her Byzantine Trilogy—comprised of The Genius of the Sea, The Judgement of Solomon, and The Head of Dionysos—demonstrates her talent for historical fiction.
Beyond her writing, Redmon has contributed significantly to the fields of journalism and prison education. She worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times and served as Writer in Residence at HMP Wandsworth, where she edited the award-winning It's Wandsworth Magazine and developed a journalism programme for inmates in collaboration with the NUJ and Writers in Prison Network.
She has taught creative writing at institutions including the University of Michigan, where she was a Visiting Associate Professor in the MFA programme, and has led residential courses at Arvon. She also edited The Silent Struggle by Sister Marie Thérèse of the Cross for the Redemptorist Press.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Redmon studied English at the University of Pennsylvania and attended The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. She continues to work as a freelance writer and editor and is currently completing her eighth novel.

Reviews

[Jan North · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book, liked the way the structure and prose style developed the books themes of religion, pre-determination and free will. Some fantastic bits of alliteration give real "sound" to the book