‘The Silent Treatment’ is the latest book by Abbie Greaves.

Frank hasn’t spoken to his wife Maggie for six months. For weeks they have lived under the same roof, slept in the same bed and eaten at the same table – all without words. Maggie has plenty of ideas as to why her husband has gone quiet, but it will take another heartbreaking turn of events before Frank finally starts to unravel the secrets that have silenced him. Is this where their story ends? Or is it where it begins?

I’ve seen much talk about this book on social media and I was dying to get reading and once I started, I found it impossible to put the love story of Frank and Maggie down.

The story is primarily seen through the narrative of Frank as he sits by his wife’s bedside and he chats to her regaling tales of their first meeting to falling in love. The story is a nostalgic tale and makes for tender and bittersweet reading as Frank reveals stories of hardship with their only daughter Eleanor as well as reasons why he has not spoke for 6 months.

It’s a beautifully written story and Frank is a lovely narrator, his love and devotion for Maggie leaps from the pages and his frustration for the situation that they are in is evident.

I completely fell in love with ‘The Silent Treatment’ with its intriguing plot line and relatable characters, this poignant debut is about love and relationships and the importance of communication.

You can buy ‘The Silent Treatment’ from Amazon and is available to buy from good bookshops.

This is a beautifully written and moving story of a marriage of 40 years. As the story starts, Maggie, driven to despair by her husband not having spoken to her for six months, takes an overdose of sleeping pills. As she lies in a coma in hospital, her husband Frank finally starts talking to her hoping that his words will bring her back. He sits by her bedside telling her their story. Back at home he reads a series of journal entries intended as Maggie’s final letter to him. And so the reader slowly discovers the tragic events that made Frank fall silent and drove Maggie to attempt to end it all.
This is a story first and foremost of parental love and family bonds, but also of mental health and addiction and the devastating impact these can have on a family and on a marriage. How far is far enough? And when you as a parent say ‘no more’, how do you live – how can you live - with the fatal consequences of that?
This is a book that will stay with me for a long time. I recommend it unreservedly. 5 stars from me.
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Thanks to #Netgalley for eARC.

Wow what an emotional book. This book shows how 2 people in the same situations see things differently but at the same time they both feel the same feelings. A great read and the ending is as happy as it could be.

In my role as English Teacher, I love being able to spend time reviewing books for our school library which I use to help the students make great picks when they visit us as well as running a library junior and senior book group where we meet every week and share the books we love and talk about what makes a great read. This is certainly a book that I'd be happy to display at the front as one of my monthly 'top picks' which often transform into 'most borrowed' between students and staff. It's a great read and ties in with my ethos of wishing to assemble a diverse, modern and thought-provoking range of books that will inspire and deepen a love of reading in our students of all ages. This book answers this brief in spade! It has s fresh and original voice and asks the readers to think whilst hooking them with a compelling storyline and strong characters  It is certainly a book that I've thought about a lot after finishing it and I've also considered how we could use some of its paragraphs in supporting and inspiring creative writing in the school through the writers' circle that we run. This is a book that I shall certainly recommend we purchase and look forward to hearing how much the staff and students enjoy this memorable and thought-provoking read.

This book centres around a husband and wife who have been married for 40 years. 

At the beginning of the book, Maggie makes a heartbreaking decision and whilst she is in hospital, Frank tells her the thing he has kept secret for six months. 

The story is in two parts, the first part is from Frank’s point of view and he documents his life with Maggie and eventually tells her the reason he hasn’t spoken to her for six months. 
The second part is Maggie’s point of view, which has been taken from her diary. In the week leading up to her hospitalisation, she has been writing her diary for Frank to read. 

I liked the first part of the story as I liked Frank’s character. A man of few words he’s totally devoted to his wife and their only daughter. I found his social awkwardness and trusting nature very endearing.
After this, the second part seemed to drag a bit for me in places and I’m not sure why. I didn’t like Maggie’s character so much but she turned out to be a complicated woman who portrayed such a happy personality. 

What the couple go through is sad and as parents they try to do the best for their daughter. 

The concept behind this story is interesting and shows the need for communication. It’s easy to read and you do feel sorry for Frank and Maggie. 

It’s a good debut novel and I would read more from this author. 

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for an advance copy of this book for review.

From the blurb alone I knew that The Silent Treatment by Abbie Greaves was going to be a book I would love, but nothing could have prepared me for the stunning and heartfelt debut it turned out to be.

The story begins with Maggie as she attempts to take her own life. Told from the point of view of her husband Frank, we soon come to learn that, for reasons as yet unknown, he hasn’t spoken to his wife for six long months. They have continued to live under the same roof, slept in the same bed and eaten at the same table – but all without words. And now Frank is full of regrets as Maggie lies in a hospital bed fighting for her life.

The first half of the book is Frank’s story as he tries to come to terms with what Maggie has done, his devastation and guilt palpable as he sits by Maggie’s bed and, on the advice of her nurse, begins to talk about the life they’ve shared together. From their first tentative meeting to their blossoming romance, Frank describes how he fell in love with this beautiful woman who he couldn’t quite believe had fallen in love with him too. With each hospital visit we learn more and more about their life together, but still the reason behind Frank’s silence remains an unspoken secret.

For the second half of the book the focus switches to Maggie as Frank discovers the diary that she has left for him to read. And it is within the pages of this most personal of items that the truth finally begins to emerge as Maggie pours out her innermost secrets, with some shocking and heartbreaking revelations for Frank as he reads the heartfelt words his wife has written.

The Silent Treatment moved me beyond words, rendering me speechless at times with the beauty and poignancy held within its pages. Abbie Greaves has written a stunning debut that captivated me from the very first page and didn’t let go until the final page had been turned, with Maggie and Frank’s story taking me on a memorable journey of love, loss, heartbreak and second chances.

Devastatingly poignant, The Silent Treatment is a special book that will stay with me for a long time to come and I honestly can’t recommend this stunning debut highly enough.

This emotional and tender love story pulled me in from the start and kept me captivated throughout. Frank and Maggie feel so real and relatable. Their story is of the successes and failures of marriage and family and is both sad yet heartwarming. One of those rare books which tears you apart and then stiches you back together.

Frank and Maggie have been married for forty years. Together, they have shared career success, parenthood, and decades spent in affectionate love. Nevertheless, when Frank walks downstairs to check on the progress of dinner one evening, he finds Maggie collapsed on the floor following an overdose. Medical staff are left with no choice but to place Maggie in a medically induced coma, from which it is uncertain whether she will ever awake.

Frank is floored, left without even a hint as to why Maggie has taken such a drastic measure. This is not, however, a case of signs being missed or cleverly concealed. Frank has missed the signs because he was not privy to them.

Because he and Maggie have not spoken a single word to each other in six months.

For all of the intrigue which surrounds the premise of this debut, I can’t say with any confidence that the contents live up to the glamour. Frank serves as a bland narrator, and Greaves’ device of constantly referring back to Mags or Maggie in the middle of paragraphs becomes very grating very quickly. Instead of adding a degree of conversational realism to Frank’s perspective, this enforced remembrance makes the prose feel superficial and contrived. The artificiality of this motif leads the reader away from sympathy for the main characters, who do not carry the layer of humanity necessary for such a response, and towards grumbling disdain for the laborious attempts to keep us immersed.

Unsurprisingly for a work of this genre, The Silent Treatment is reliant on the slow revelation of the secret which truly caused Maggie’s overdose. The secret, however, is obvious from a very early stage, a detail which is not made any easier by the fact that the novel stands at a rather sluggish 300 pages. The length may have been assuaged if the secret was more exciting, if the characters were more compelling and human, but I must confess that neither of these things are true of The Silent Treatment. In truth, I wasn’t interested to see what torture-pornographic paths the author had taken in order to meet their uninspired conclusion.

For all of the titillation which its synopsis caused, I must confess that The Silent Treatment was a genuine struggle for me to get through. It took me a very, very long time to finish this book. Better than making me angry, and worse than making me excited, this was a novel which made me apathetic.

This is such an assured, brilliant debut. It is a wonderful, insightful, heartfelt look at communication and relationships through time.

I wasn't expecting this book to be as hard-hitting as it was. This story really got under my skin and I felt very emotional when reading it! The pacing was excellent - the perfect amount of suspense throughout and towards the end I was racing to find out what would happen.

Frank and Maggie have been happily married for 40 years, so why haven’t they spoken for the last 6 months?  We find out why as Frank sits beside Maggie’s hospital bed and finally begins to talk.  Later on there’s Maggie’s version of events.  I thoroughly enjoyed this and it was very easy to get into.  Poor, ungainly, ill at ease Frank and Maggie, the livelier of the pair with their share of happiness and sadness and how they dealt with everything thrown at them.  They were human and you could definitely feel for them with their dilemmas.  Don’t know how they managed so much silence though - don’t think I’d last 6 hours, let alone 6 months!

Novels about marital relationships don’t usually excite me much but the premise of The Silent Treatment was intriguing.

Frank and Maggie have been married for more than 40 years. But for the last six months, Frank has not uttered a single word to his wife. They’ve shared the same house, and even the same bed, and eaten meals together. But all without speaking.

What triggered this silent treatment? An argument (must have been one hell of a row to still be festering after six months) ? A medical condition rendering incapable of speech?

It takes almost the whole of the novel for us to discover the reason in this accomplished debut by Abbie Greaves.

A Marriage In Retrospect
But first we learn about the history of their marriage, its delights and its sorrows.

Frank goes first, reminiscing about the heady, ecstatic days of their early life together. He’d always been a bit of a loner, never much of a hit with girls, but as soon as he saw Maggie, he knew she was the girl of his dreams. Unbelievably (to him) his feelings were reciprocated.

The one blot on their marriage is that the child Maggie longs for, never materialises. They learn to live with the loss and Maggie’s bouts of depression. But then completely out of the blue, she is pregnant, and their life is made complete by a daughter who is bright, intelligent and a joy. Until she hits her teenage years that is, and goes completely off the rails, causing untold pain and anguish for her parents.

Confession Propelled by Tragedy
We learn this only because out of necessity Frank has started to talk to Maggie. There’s still no conversation. There can’t be because Maggie is in a coma, the result of an overdose of sleeping pills. Frank found her collapsed unconscious at the kitchen table.

Terrified that she may die before he has a chance to explain his silence, he knows he has to explain his silence. He’s always been a quiet man, one who finds it difficult to express his emotions. “Talking has never been my strong point, “he admits.

His task now involves such a painful confession he can get there only in small stages, starting right at the beginning. He’d been on the point of revealing everything to Maggie once before when his guilt was “so pure, so overwhelming”. But he chickened out when he saw her, a shadow of her former self and knew he couldn’t do cause her any more harm.

"I opened my mouth a million times and God knows you must have noticed. I thought maybe once the shock had worn off it would be easier. But that never happened. It just got harder and harder… I told myself I had time to find the right way to say it. I wanted a way to tell you the truth without risking you leaving me…"

Time Running Out
But now that time is rapidly eroding. Two hours before the doctors will decide they can do no more for his wife. Will he make it before it’s too late?

Abbie Greaves keeps up the suspense throughout the whole of Frank’s narratives, with plenty of hints to keep us guessing. To delay the resolution still further, she switches to Maggie’s perspective, told through a series of notes she’s left for her husband to read after her death.

It’s through Maggie’s version of events over the last six months, that we can fully appreciate Frank was not the only partner who had left things unsaid.

As a deeply intimate but also realistic portrait of a relationship, The Silent Treatment is a success. At times delightful, it’s also heartbreakingly sad as it shows the utter devotion of a couple crack under the strain of a wayward child.

The suspense element didn’t work as well for me. I found Frank’s anguished comments hinting at the catastrophic nature of his revelation, set up a huge expectation in my mind. The disclosure of the secret was ultimately a disappointment. I remember reading it and thinking: Is that all? If there hadn’t been such a build up I would have accepted the ending far more readily.

Despite that I still enjoyed the novel’s exploration of love, loss, grief and guilt. It will be interesting to see her next novel.

This book was so much more than I expected. Heart-breaking in so many ways, I consumed every page and stayed up until the small hours to complete it. 

The book begins with Maggie taking an overdose. Her husband Frank finds her, and as she lies in an induced come, he takes up residence in the hospital and spends hours telling their story, and confessing to her everything he wishes he had said. He is haunted by something and needs to confess it to her. He had tried to tell her before her overdose, but was so afraid of losing her that every time he tried to speak, he would choke on his words, and ended up becoming silent for the last six months. 

He recounts their love story, how she was his Forever Girl. The helplessness he felt when Maggie was heartbroken, month after month, when she failed to become pregnant. The guilt over being happy just the two of them. 

And then, after fifteen years together, their surprise baby is born. Eleanor. Their world, their joy, their everything. But as she becomes a teenager, their world falls apart, as they watch Eleanor drift away from them, and into a life of grief and addiction. They are helpless. Just as Frank is about to confess his deepest secret, Maggie shows signs of waking and he is sent away. On returning home he finds letters that Maggie has written to him over the last week. These detail her version of their story, the lies she has told , the secrets she has kept. Also wracked with guilt and afraid of losing him, she writes her confession before taking sleeping pills.

As Frank rushes back to the hospital he finally speaks to Maggie and they are united by finally revealing their truths to one another. Despite the saddest of circumstances, they find their way back to one another, and whilst they will always have a part of them missing, they learn how to live on together, in love.

This is a slow burner of a book and one that examines love, relationships and the ties that bind us together. It’s heartfelt and beautifully written as Frank pieces together his life with Maggie from her hospital bedside. Six months ago something happened that changed the fabric of their lives together forever and since then Frank hasn’t spoken a word to Maggie. His silence has build and grown, gnawing at their relationship and what remains of their stability until Maggie takes the ultimate action of overdosing on her sleeping pills. Now Frank has to find his voice and bring his wife of forty years back from the brink, in the process exposing the secret that has threatened to overwhelm him.

I found myself drawn into this quiet narrative, living beside Frank and Maggie as their relationship blossoms and grows, their lives intertwining and merging. Both characters come to life as they struggle with infertility, depression and then with the joys and tribulations of bringing a child up in a house of love and safety. The novel weaves its way through the different stages and facets of their relationship as Frank slowly brings himself to the events of the last six months. His love for Maggie is clear on every page, despite the very real hurt his silence has wrought. To begin with, all you see is Frank’s side of events which made Maggie somewhat less accessible, but when Frank finds his wife’s notebook, you get a glimpse into both sides of the relationship and the events that drew them to this point. This was cleverly done, as it brought both characters to life and gave me far more insight into Maggie’s personality and behaviour.

I will say that I saw the twist of sorts coming long before the actual reveal, but this didn’t spoil the book for me at all. Of anything, the only reason I have taken a star away is because the events seemed somewhat sanitised, so whereas you got the full force of emotions in the earlier novel, there was a soft coating over the spiralling decline. Their daughter clearly has some major issues and I’d have liked to see more of this, rather than standing on the outside with the parents, only getting fragmentary glimpses. That said, I was honestly touched by the events of the novel and empathised with all of the characters to one degree or another. As the novel is very much focused on parenting, it would have been more rounded with the daughters perspective, but what is here is beautifully written and heart rending.

Many thanks to NetGalley for my free review copy of this title.

This book wasn't really what I was expecting from the blurb. I had no idea that this was about a couple that was "happily married" for over 40 years. I expected more something along the lines of young or middle-aged couple with relationship problems than a family drama.
I can see why many people adore this book, but I found the ending too convenient, the story overly dramatic and it simply didn't resonate with me.

*SPOILER ALERT*
We're basically dealing with Frank, who's a quiet and selfish guy obsessed with his wife Maggie and Maggie craves for a family she never had, living through a miscarriage and ending up depressed and obsessed with her daughter.
Both of them start hiding important things about their daughter and from what I read, both of them say repeatedly how happy and great their marriage is, but they have serious communication problems.
I just couldn't relate to their behavior at all. They didn't speak about their finances properly (if they can afford this particular house or when Maggie wants to be a stay-at-home-mum) nor about their daughter's issues. I do believe that there are families out there that might be like this, but I simply cannot relate as it is unfathomable to me, not to speak to my partner openly about all those incredibly important topics.

That's 2 coffee cups out of 5 for me and the book is available now.

Thank you Random House UK Cornerstone and Netgalley for providing me with an eARC.

This is a very skilled, well-written debut which offers a measured, paced insight into the unravelling of a marriage, and what led to six months of silence. Alternating between the two points of view of Frank and Maggie, the reader is immersed in the story of their marriage, slowly working it's way to the present day after the silence. 

The writing is beautiful, with extremely detailed and well-wrought description. It's not a fast paced novel, but it deserves the time you give.

I loved this book! Abbie Greaves set up the story so brilliantly that I was immediately drawn into the narrative and rooting for Frank and Maggie. 
I love how this book was set out, giving us Frank and Maggies point of view made for a much more complex and enjoyable read. As well as this, I loved how we were fed the reasons why Maggie and Frank stopped talking in dribs and drabs, it made me so much more invested in the story that I couldn't put it down. I finished it in 24 hours! 

I can''t wait to read more by Abbie Greaves, this book was a stunning debut.

This is the story of a couple who have lost their way and haven't spoken in six months. It starts with a tragic  incident which we don't get much information about and then develops through the husband sharing their history with glimpses of the present thrown in.

To be honest I found this book a little slow paced. I absolutely love the idea but I just felt it a bit of a chore to get through even though I love books with older people as the main characters!

This book is mesmerising. The events crashing from one page to another. Times of highs and lows, joy and destruction. A love story with a tragic ending, or is it?
I felt so many emotions  for this couple, and the life that unfolded.

I throughly enjoyed this book, although at first I wasn’t sure I soon got into it and settled down. I read this extremely quickly as I kept on reading wanting to know how things where going to turn out. This was a different kind of book for me and it made a lovely change to read something.
My thanks NetGalley and the publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this book in return for an honest review.