Silence

Days before her high school graduation, Nicki Groh runs away from the New Hampshire town where she has grown up. In the months that follow, Nicki will find her way back home, a young woman much changed from her earlier self.

Harriet Groh, Nicki's adoptive mother, is the person most affected by Nicki's absence. Much of the story is told by her, and much of the story is about her, how she "disappears," too, from an earlier self and discovers her own voice, even if silence is the language in which she finds it.

Harriet's voice continues the tradition of female voices that Mr. Brookhouse began in Running Out, his first novel, which Anthony Burgess called "A triumph of poetic economy and a powerful evocation of place." He continued this voice with A Selfish Woman. Silence once again displays Brookhouse's elegant, economical prose.

Silence is a deepening narrative about the roles we play, how we fit into them, how we choose them, or how they choose us. The novel is structured around earth, air, fire, and water-essential elements of the ancient world whose influence remains powerful in ours.