A powerful story following the life of a Syrian refugee who is a mute, and spends her days watching people live their lives through her window. However, one day she witnesses an attack on the mosque nearby, and what follows in the wake of this attack is captivating I must say.

Beautifully written, with the character being given so much depth and development throughout. The storyline itself is perfectly paced and intriguing to the end.

What a powerful story and very atmospheric. The book is so raw and emotional, and get me engaged right until the end. The story shows the reader the impact of war and refuge is not always This novel shows us the human impact of war as I felt the characters trauma. A very important read.

A powerful novel which looks at the experience of a young mute Syrian refugee woman who after spending her days watching her community through her window witnesses an attack on the local mosque. I found this to be an intense and beautifully written novel which gives a voice to those so often ignored in contemporary fiction.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review a digital ARC.

This was atmospheric and deliberately low-key but I didn't feel curious enough to want to read on. DNF

A young Muslim Syrian immigrant now lives in the UK, after being exposed to conflict. She is mute since experiencing the trauma of war. She is a writer that leads a humble and simple life. She considers herself small and insignificant as she tries to blend in and not draw attention to herself. People often assume she is deaf as well as mute, but she doesn’t mind, it helps her keep to herself.
She lives in a block of flats and can see much of what happens in her neighbour’s apartments. She observes everything. She is constantly on alert. She has memorable nicknames names for her neighbours; such as the Juicer (a health obsessed man), No lights man (never uses the lights unless he bring women back), etc that are vivid and thoroughly entertaining to read about. They inject some humour into what could otherwise be a sombre read.
It is as much about self-discovery, learning to live in your own skin. It is a most intricately written insight into someone who had a well-educated and fairly privileged upbringing, but whose life has been drastically and permanently affected by war.
Through the desire to be a writer, the Voiceless, gains a column in a local paper offering observations of a Syrian Asylum seeker. At first she does not want to reveal anything about herself just people around her and insights into the way they behaviour or politics to inform behaviours and ways of life.
However her editor pushes her and slowly she begins to give more information about herself that as a reader we learn about also. Slowly, slowly we learn about life pre arrival to UK, the terror on the boats to how she has tried to adapt in the UK. Despite her reluctance she does start to form relationships with some of those around her, which helps her to start to heal and it makes for a fitting narrative with a pleasing denouement. Sometimes I felt uncomfortable with how much she observes and how much she through this behaviour maybe inappropriately infiltrates others’ lives, but it is a powerful and meaningful way of capturing someone who has live in a heightened state of fight or flight since exposure to horrors most of us thankfully can never truly imagine. Powerful, evocative with wonderful linguistic & descriptive writing skills, this is something raw, evocative and different, and something we should encourage many to read.

This book is difficult to review as the back story is horrific but only referred to in small slices and brief glimpses. The current story of a woman living in England in a tower block, mute and scared but is using her voice to write pieces for magazines while watching her neighbours through her window into their lives. The writing is exquisite and understated, which makes a very powerful story. There were parts of the book I had to stop and ponder as she had put something so clearly but with great depth.

A really interesting and ultimately life affirming read. The story weaves a modern day voyeur’s attempt to avoid integration on a hostile estate and her perilous journey from the conflict in Syria .

A very moving modern, but hard to follow story. A refugee, a block of flats and the diversity of life therein and the dramas that brings. A difficult read.

This is a beautifully written book and starts off quite lightly and gets progressively deeper and more disturbing. I had to read it in the daytime as I was worried about what was going to happen next. A really interesting and thoughtful insight into other lives.
I've just ordered the author's other book

Huge fan of this author and this is another absolutely superb read. I have nothing negative I can say about this book. It has been a great read filled with interesting characters and a unique plot.

Firstly I must say that I really struggled to read this book. It certainly is not what I expected from the write up. I could not get into the character nor the others in the flats and was totally confused over many of the flashback stories. The other characters in the flats were well and humorously described but seemed lost on the interaction with the main character. The horrors faced along the journey were terrible, and candidly described giving full traumatic details.
I understand the point being made that the Muslim community were trying to show that it is wrong to condemn a whole faith for the actions of the minority, however the atrocities committed by these few tend to stay in our minds more and so cause fear.
I have to add that I understand her requirement/desperation to leave Syria but I cannot comprehend the determination of all the refugees like her that their only ambition is to get to the U.K. whatever financial hardship or assorted struggles along the long journey.

Silence is a Sense is undoubtedly an expressive account of a young refugee woman who, after an unimaginable trauma, chooses a path of selective mutism. Living a distanced existence in a block of flats she becomes a voyeur, watching those she can see from her window. Others will engage with this book more than I did which is more to do with the fact that it is just too traumatic a story for me to engage with at this moment. It was not what I expected at all. Hopefully I will revisit this book in the future. Thanks for the ARC.

Layla AlAmmar’s second novel is fantastic. An intense, at times claustrophobic, account of an unnamed Syrian woman living an anonymous life in a block of flats in a London suburb and her interactions with the people around her.

The book goes between the mundanity of suburbia to life in Syria before the war and the journey to the UK with glimpses of the horror she faced along the way.

It’s not an easy book to read at times but that is in no way a criticism. This book really made me think about how we treat refugees and other displaced people.

It will stay with me for a long time

Silence is a Sense, Layla AlAmmar

Review from Jeannie Zelos book reviews

Genre: General Fiction (Adult)

I was intrigued by the description, with so many displaced people across the world this is a scene that must play out over and over.
However, sadly the novel failed to engage my interest, I just didn't connect with the narrator or the people she's talking about. Maybe I'll come back to it another time, and feel differently. After all I can see others have loved this book. For now though its a fail for me.

Stars: Two, a story others love but which didn't connect with me.

ARC supplied by Netgalley and publishers

I really wanted to love this book but struggled to really get into it. Perhaps I read it at the wrong time when really I wanted to read something light hearted and frivolous but I didn't enjoy as much as I thought I would and it wasn't the book I expected it to be.

I wasn't sure if this book was based on personal experiences or fiction. Either way I guess it brings home the harsh brutality of a female Syrian refugee trying to find another life, far from home. The girl recounting the story has become mute but writes under the name of the voiceless. She is also a voyeur, watching her neighbours from a flat in an estate in an unnamed U.K city. We hear horrendous stories of her journey in snippets and we see that the lives around her in her place of asylum are also far from perfect. This is a very thought provoking read.

Silence is a Sense tells the story of a selectively mute Syrian Refugee with alternating lyricism and brutality.

The reader is granted entry into her mind as she watches the other residents of her apartment complex through her window, and strangers become acquaintances as she becomes unwillingly involved in their lives. Everything is coloured by her PTSD and repressed memories of her journey to the UK, which are well rendered by Al Ammar.

Reading this book felt like swallowing a stone dipped in honey. Its subject matter is brutal, and being inside the narrator’s trauma is claustrophobic and anxiety inducing. This contrasts with the writing of the novel, which is breathtaking in places. I highlighted swathes of my copy and Al Ammar’s words will stay with me. The characters and setting are fully fleshed out - I feel like I know versions of these characters.

This book deserves to be read widely, and I recommend it heartily, though with multiple content warnings.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Silence is a Sense is a novel that cuts brutally and unflinchingly to the heart of trauma. The characters were raw and I loved the way that AlAmmar questioned the reliabilty of memory and how that can manifest to create a state of self denial.
This was very much a character driven story, and I loved seeing the peripheral characters through the eyes of the protagonist, capturing slice of life of those characters alongside her inner turmoil and tradgedies.
The writting in this was very lyrical and thought provoking, but at the same time compelled the reader forwards, a rare mix in my opinion.
A very current novel looking at immigration, regilion, PTSD and relationships. People who enjoyed The Beekeeper of Aleppo will love this book. Highly recommend.

“No one is truly voiceless, … either they silence you, or you silence yourself.”
This was a very interesting and thought-provoking book. Whether you – or your society – are pro or anti asylum seekers, very few of us have any idea what goes on in an asylum seeker’s head. We may have heard about the horrors they have left behind, the arduous and dangerous trek to ‘safety’ – but can we really – from our comfortable lives – ever truly understand what they have been through, what indelible marks life has branded into their souls. There is no ‘typical’ asylum seeker. All are individuals, with own personal experiences and devils. Through the encounters, writings and ideas of one such asylum seeker – Rana Halab from Syria, the Voiceless – the book tries to open our eyes to one such person’s life.
The book is narrated in the first person, and our narrator is difficult to appreciate at first – she is too different. She watches life and people go by through her window, a silent voyeur. Her world is peopled with cardboard characters, whom she names according to what she sees of them: No-lights-Man, the Juicer, the Dad, the Old Couple, Mr Big Man, the Old Man … She initially does not ascribe any humanity to them, and likewise, they seem to see her as only “The Arab”, “the Asylum Seeker”, the dumb woman. Slowly, as she is drawn into interactions with her neighbours, they gain names (Adam, Chloe, Ruth, Helen, Matt …) and personalities, and our narrator becomes more relatable.
The one character who immediately deserves a name, is Hassan, the local shopkeeper:
“He can’t be much more than forty, but he’s exceedingly prickly. Far too prickly for someone his age, but there’s no telling what a person has been through.”
To me, this quote sums up the narrator’s difficult personality too.
Most of the story takes place in the present, in and around the high rise building where the narrator now resides in Britain, but there are flashbacks to her former life in Aleppo.
Our narrator does not speak – a diagnosis of ‘hysterical mutism’ brought about by the traumas she has experienced. But, she is a highly intelligent and articulate lady, who writes for a London magazine under the pseudonym “The Voiceless”.
“It’s not so difficult to know what people want. At the root of it we all want the same things: freedom, happiness, safety. I want to write what I want to write without the fear of a knock at the door and an interrogation room. I want to love who I want to love without the fear of death or corrective rape. I want to wear what I want to wear without the worry that men will see my skirt or the buttons on my shirt as an invitation. That’s it. The freedom to live how we want to live.”
Her editor – and then later Adam – have firm ideas about what she (as a female, Arab, Muslim refugee) should believe in and campaign for. But they are not the narrator.
“They  want  me  to  speak  for the chaos of the world, to weave the abstracts of cultural convulsions and scapegoats and simple apathy into my story, so that by  seeing  ‘me’,  by  knowing  ‘me’,  you  might  know  them  all,  and  I  suppose  –  by  extension  –  might  feel  some  degree  of  empathy  for  them all.”

“There’s this idea that if only you bombard bigots with enough facts and data and statistics, you can cure them. This notion that their hatred comes from a place of ignorance is one people have a hard time shaking. It’s not a lack of education, … It’s fear; fear of the unknown, the Other, fear that things are changing in ways he can’t predict or control.”

“ Is it my job,  as  a  Muslim,  to  try  to  convince  you  not  to  be  afraid  of  me?  That  my people are not hardwired to hate you, to want to blow you up  on a tube or ram you with a van?”
The terror in her life never goes away. Safety is always relative, never absolute:
“And when I first arrived, I couldn’t assimilate … I couldn’t reconcile myself to the notion that I was free to go anywhere. So I set invisible borders that I abided by for a good, long while.”
Gradually, her borders expand – both physically and mentally. But the fear never leaves –
“I know I’m safe here, although the meaning of that has a habit of slipping through my hands like water. I can’t explain even to myself, my hesitation, my continued sense that I’m still living in some indefinite holding room”
and can come thundering back at any time:
“I was supposed to be safe here. I was supposed to be safe here. I was supposed to be safe here …”
As the reader you become more and more wrapped up in the narrator’s life, and in her community. Can she, will she, ever find the courage to speak, rather than just anonymously write? Will the violence ever truly recede? We don’t have a civil war in this country, but are we – as a society – less violent, less bigoted, less intolerant than the country the narrator came from?
“ any time an attack occurs, there comes this  blanket  condemnation  of  an  entire  faith  –  as  though  the  problem  were  one  of  religion  rather  than  interpretation.  The  majority  have  no time for such subtleties of thought. Muslim Refugee = Muslim  Terrorist is so much simpler.”

“What  does  it  mean  to  be  American?  A  red-blooded  one,  as  they’re so fond of saying, and I wonder what colour they imagine  the  rest  of  the  world  bleeds.  Every  year  they  celebrate  the  brutal  taking  of  a  land  that,  by  any  definition  of  blood  and  soil,  was  not  theirs, a systematic replacing of the native population. Is that why you fear refugees and immigrants so much? Because  you know that with determination, and no small amount of violence,  complete and total dominion can be achieved?”
While not all the ideas in this book are new to me, many of the comments have been eye openers, and have made me stop and think, and question my own assumptions about asylum seekers and refugees.
I highly recommend this book.

This book is intensely moving as we meet a girl known in print as 'The Voiceless'. She is living in the UK having escaped Aleppo, Syria. We hear her story in snippets through memories and through the articles that she writes, which meant that the time narrative hops about a bit - this reflects the manner in which her thoughts and memories come to the surface and play on her mind.
This novel shows us the human impact of war and shows how refuge is not always a sanctuary.
We also meet see the community that she somewhat unwillingly finds herself a part of, initially as an observer of the flats opposite and then, more so, as she ventures to the local shop and mosque and begins to meet these people in person.
It is clear that she has seen and faced the worst of humanity and we see and feel her trauma. I would have liked a little more explanation of how she found herself travelling alone and her families' situation but that does not stop this being an immensely powerful book that is utterly compelling to read and has an important story to tell.