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The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins
has been my most anticipated read in a long time - The Binding is one of my top five all time books and The Betrayals was also sublime - I recommend both all the time! I’m so delighted to say that The Silence Factory did NOT disappoint and was all that I hoped it would be ✨

Speculative historical fiction is my favourite genre, and The Silence Factory takes us to an alternating timeline between generations where a discovery has the potential to change the world in an incredibly peculiar way. 🕸️

This is gothic mastery, and sinister in so many ways; industry and ambition reveal entanglements and exploitation, and characters become embroiled in dangerous and seductive webs of lies, truths and desires. 🕷️

This is a story of extreme contrasts; peace and conflict, calm and turbulence, love and hate, and the two sides of the silk. ✨

This is a perfect and captivating novel to lose yourself in, truly unique and perfectly twisty, shocking and dark, and with an impending sense of doom throughout - the climax is turbulent with lots I didn’t see coming. Plus the final scene is perfect 👌
Many thanks for this arc, thoughts are my own.

When I read The Binding in 2018 I knew right away that Bridget Collins would become an automatic-read author for me. So when I saw The Silence Factory on NetGalley for review, it was an instant request.

Sir Edward Ashmore-Percy has invented silk made from spiders' webs that insulates perfectly from sound. He hires aurist and aspiring poet Henry Latimer to cure his daughter's deafness and use his talent for words to promote the silk. Henry becomes infatuated with Sir Edward until he finds out the true power or the silk.

The book tells the story of Henry and also the Ashmores, Sophie and James, as they discover the silk on a Greek island.

Much like Henry's descent into Sir Edward's world, I read this slowly at first and then fell into it head first. I was swept along as the pace increased and I finished half of it in one sitting. I was with Henry all the way, enamoured also by Sir Edward and blind to his true intentions. I felt like a frog in a pot of hot water, gradually getting hotter and hotter until I've been boiled alive without even realising.

The production of the silk was a very loud process, with the noise being so deafening it drove some people mad. Collins did an excellent job of conveying the level of noise and I can imagine an audiobook would be interesting especially if you included the noise. For me, I can't wait to see how nice the hardback will be.

The Silence Factory is sumptuous, dark, and every bit as magical as The Binding. I could believe these two books live in the same world and I can't wait to see what Collins imbues with dark magic next.

This review will be published on clearlyreads on 29th March.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the Arc of this book!
My rating of this book should not take away from how phenomenal the writing is. The imagery this book created made it feel like I was watching a movie.
2 different time lines through following Henry - an audiologist who wants to make a name for himself and forget his past - and the diary entries of Sophia - the wife of James who started it all. This book follows both their stories in relation the making of silk from spiders found on a Greek island and how it changes people for better or worse.
The character description had me feeling love and hatred for these characters. It uncovers the consequences of the silk on the town of Telverton and its residents.
Personally this book isn’t one I would read again, however it would be a book I would recommend.

This atmospheric and disquieting novel consists of two interlinked story threads, set in different parts of the 19th century. One is told through the journals of Sophia, who has accompanied her abusive, manipulative husband to a remote Greek island in search of a spider whose webs are supposed to have mystical properties. Decades later, the main narrative is from the perspective of Henry Latimer, an unhappy widower who gets a chance to escape his life in London after a chance meeting with Sir Edward, a wealth silk manufacturer. He quickly becomes obsessed with the man as well as the opportunity to improve his lot in life.

The Telverton Silk is no ordinary fabric - made from the webs of the mythical Greek spiders, one side completely blocks all sound, whilst the other creates strange 'echoes'. Henry sees huge potential in the product and finds he has a gift for salesmanship. But others are not convinced by either the silk or the man who owns it. The factory has a history of horrible accidents, the 'echoes' from the silk cause sicknesses and long term damage in the residents, and Edward is a capricious, unpredictable character. It's clear to the reader that things are not likely to end well, but it's an intriguing journey getting there.

The story is well written, creating a sense of strong unease without resorting to flowery language. It's very readable and Henry is a likeable character. I thought his refusal to see the very obvious warning signs - not to mention heed explicit warnings - would become annoying, but I didn't find it like that because it was a human, believable behaviour. Most of us know what it's like to be in the grip of a passion - whether for a person, a cause or something else - and how in that state it's possible to ignore anything that doesn't suit us. Henry wavers from time to time, but his desperation to gain a better life - particularly given his vulnerability (lonely, still grieving his wife and child) - wins out. It's not rational behaviour, but it is how I can believe a man in Henry's situation could behave.

The concept of the silk is a clever one and even has a bit of pseudoscience behind it to explain the properties. Collins puts across very well its strangeness - how it is both lovely and terrible. She is a vivid writer and I can clearly see all the settings and characters when I think about the book. It's well paced - despite not having much 'action' as such it is always absorbing and never feels slow. It didn't turn out the way I expected it to either, which is a refreshing treat for someone who reads a lot. I admired the choices she made for her characters and for not sticking to a formula.

I would recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys historical fantasy or stories with a supernatural element - fans of Laura Purcell and Sarah Waters are likely to enjoy it. It's the best of Collins' books so far (I've read three) and I'm intrigued to see what her next one is about.

This was immense! A richly gothic and hanging tale that weaves (pun intended) the threads of a spellbinding tale, beautifully written! I loved it!

Another brilliant concept from Bridget Collins and so well-executed! I loved the two timelines with Sophia discovering the spiders in the past and Henry attempting to use the silk to build Sir Edward's fortune in the central timeline. The parallels between Sophia and her husband and Henry and Sir Edward and the negative impact of the spiders on their relationship was very clever, and the exploration of Henry and Sir Edward's romantic connection was so thoughtful and considered.

On a Greek island in the 1820s, Sophia is trying to cope with her married life. Her husband, James, is obsessed with finding a particular spider, which supposedly spins silk that has unusual properties. When Sophia accidentally finds a specimen, neither of them realize that James' obsession will trap him in its web just as securely as the spider webs trap the rats and 'suck them dry' when they're dropped into the tanks as food. James leaves the island with as many spiders as he can carry and goes back to England. He thinks that as a British Christian man, he is smarter than everyone else and entitled to take what he wants.

Some decades later, Henry Latimer, a grieving widower, is plodding through his days as a clerk in his father-in-law's audiology shop. One day, Sir Edward shows up and engages Henry in conversation. He comments that Henry sells sound and he sells silence. Henry is clearly puzzled, so Sir Edward gives him a piece of spider silk with special properties. When one side is facing, utter silence results. The outer facing side creates weird murmurs, whispers, and disturbing noises. Sir Edward has inherited his great uncle James' estate and the family lace factory, which he is using to try to mass market the silk. Henry becomes obsessed with the silk after bringing it home and using it to block out the cacophony outside. He gets his first good night of sleep since his wife died in childbirth. When Sir Edward wants someone to come to his home to test his deaf daughter, Henry goes. He, too, gets tangled up in the web of silk and refuses to heed the warnings of people who try to help him. He desperately wants to outrun the whispers, murmurs, and disturbing noises in his own mind, but of course, none of us can do that. While he sees a chance at a new life as his feelings for Sir Edward grow deeper, he also has to work hard to ignore the horrific effects of the factory on the town and especially the people, including the children, who work there.

This is the first book I've read by this author, but it definitely won't be the last. It's a fantastic book that hooked me from the start. The book moves back and forth between Sophia's diary entries and Henry's story, with the former sprinkled throughout the book. I was gripped by both storylines as the characters struggle to escape the bonds that imprison them, whether it is James with his ego and need to impress his brother, leading to the fixation on the spiders, Sir Edward with his sense of entitlement and need to wield power and get more cash, Sophia, who is stuck in a marriage with a man growing more angry and erratic, or Henry, who is trying to outrun his grief and guilt. The spiders provide a good metaphor for this theme as they weave their webs, entrapping and destroying prey much larger than themselves. Will they also (indirectly) destroy the humans who have stolen them from their native habitat in order to exploit them? At one point, Sophia comments that she knows the spiders are furious at them. The difference between the rats dropped into the spider tanks and the humans outside of it, of course, is choice. The rats have none. The spiders have none. The humans have choices, but will they make the right ones in time? What will become of the people involved, from those in charge to those working in the factory and at the mercy of the people and machines that make the factory run? What happened to Sophia and James? Read this excellent book to find out!

Lyrical and haunting, this is another great book from Bridget Collins. Thematically rich and a very moving account of parenthood and grief, it explores the twisted web spun by greed and ambition, and how misguided love traps the two main protagonists in that net.

Beautifully written, gothic and oppressively atmospheric but a tad anticlimactic.

Bereaved audiologist Henry Latimer helps those who can’t hear but when he is enlisted by Sir Edward Ashmore-Percy to help his daughter, Henry is drawn into a world of silence with Sir Edward’s miraculous silk. The Telverton silk is like nothing else, it creates pure, unearthly silence. Henry is mesmerised and drawn into Sir Edward’s web, spinning tales of the silk’s virtues, dismissing the nefarious tales about accidents in the factory, and the effect on the children of Telverton - but is he foolish to dismiss the warnings?

The story is split between the present with Henry Latimer and Sir Edward, and the past of Sir Edward’s great-uncle and aunt who discovered the silk in the Mediterranean. I loved Sophia’s story in Greece the most and I felt it was a bit of a shame this is the support to the narrative and not the main event.

The writing is exquisite and should come with a trigger warning for any arachnophobes among us (myself included). I could feel the silk and its silence, I could feel Henry’s pain and Sophia’s desperation. And most (and worst of all) the spiders scuttling and weaving. The writing pushes in on you like heavy air before a storm. Collins is a superb writer.

It’s an amazing idea for a story, unique and so well thought out BUT it spends so long building and then wraps up quickly which was a bit disappointing. My other slight irritation with the story is that it doesn’t tell you when this is set which would REALLY help contextualise the story.

Overall, really beautiful and I’m excited to read Collins back catalogue of work. Also the cover artwork is absolutely stunning.

Thank you Netgalley and Harper Collins for my arc

Captured by the art work, and the tile of this book, I devoured this work quicker than I could read. This masterful story telling took me from shore to shore, each chapter encouraging and inciting me towards the next. It is not often that a new story truly invents itself and the creativity of this story is to be commended.
I experienced so many emotions, being led to love, to grief, to anger. Bridget Collins is an artist of the psyche.and you will not be disappointed if you dare to embark .

An arresting and hypnotising novel in a high victorian gothic style, this books drew me in and had me captivated from the start. A chance encounter between Edward Ashmore-Percy, haughty and handsome mill owner and Henry Latimer, recently widowed failed poet leads to a chain of events that are horrifying and disturbing in their restraint of description and the implications behind Henry's discoveries that are never quite explicitly shown.

There is a wonderfully spooky atmosphere and anxiety that is sustained throughout as the consequences of the Ashmore-Percy's theft of spiders to drive their silk mill has more consequences for many more people than might have been anticipated.

The book is as disorienting to the reader as to the characters under the spell of the silk, its stories as skilfully woven together.

An astonishing idea that is well executed. It is set over two time frames, in a version of the nineteenth century, in a fictional town in England and an island in Greece,
This is a story where ambition ans greed leads to hardship, despair and deprivation. The writing is atmospheric and dark, but the promise of friendship and maybe even love lifts the reader, along with the ominous but intriguing presence of the silk spun by the spiders stolen from Greece. I didn’t want to put it down until I found out what happened
to Henry, the main character in the later timeframe. :He was both endearing and infuriating, but I cared.
The Silence Factory would be a good young adult read and would also make a fabulous film.

𝘛𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘰 𝘏𝘢𝘳𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘊𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘕𝘦𝘵𝘎𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘈𝘙𝘊.

I found The Silence Factory to be a challenging read - as sticky and beguiling as the spider webs spun throughout its pages. Collins has an incredible knack for wrangling prose; gothic and poetic and incredibly, viscerally grim at times. I found myself highlighting more than a few passages to return to because the images she evoked were so wonderfully immersive and vivid. For a book about senses, it's no surprise that they're played upon so much. The actual nitty-gritty writing here is fantastic, but it was the emotional tether to the characters (or lack thereof) that I struggled with.

I found the prologue incredibly disjointed and difficult to wade through, though I suspect part of that was laying the groundwork for the echoes and confusions that are part and parcel of the narrative. As a result, I felt a little alienated by the text (which extended to a prolonged detachment from the protagonists). And that's where my main qualm with The Silence Factory lies - I really didn't get on with the protagonists. Without delving too far into spoiler territory, I found the MMC Henry to be spineless, naïve and far too much of a bootlicker. His propensity to self-gaslight became incredibly wearisome after a time. I so desperately wanted to connect with him, but the man made it difficult!

I'm sure fans of gothic and Victorian fiction will find lots to love here. Weirdly, the book it most reminded me of was Babel (R.F. Kuang) - not an 𝘦𝘯𝘫𝘰𝘺𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 read, per se, but with lots of nuggets of images and ideas, and something important to say.

"𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘢 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥; 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘭."

Sophia, a pregnant English woman has been drugged and taken against her will by her husband to a ship escaping back to England from a remote Greek Island where he has stolen magic silk spinning spiders from a sacred place his wife was shown by an islander she had befriended. Like Arachne, the weaver who was turned into a spider, Bridget Collins in her latest novels spins and weaves an epic tale in a gothic Victorian fantasy world using the lush and vivid prose that have become her hallmark. You will be pulled into her spider web. The Silence Factory is just as engaging and page turning as her other novels for adults starting with The Binding. A great immersive read.

This book was so enjoyable in many different ways. Starting in the 1820’s in a Greek island when James who is already wealthy is trying to track down mysterious spiders that spin silk with mysterious properties. He wants to further improve his fortune and also establish himself as a man of science to be respected. He does treat his wife Sophia dreadfully [and indeed there was only one man in the whole book who shows any kindness] but eventually they return to England so that his lace factory can be be converted to making the silk.
Then two generations later Sir Edwards mill is struggling financially and enlists the help of Henry Latimer who originally came to the family estate to provide hearing instruments for his deaf daughter.
The spider silk has amazing properties in that depending on how it is folded , it can reduce the noise of the outside world and bring peace and conversely seems to disturb and adversely effect those in the vicinity. So the townsfolk around the mill have strange maladies as well as the usual deafness from working in the hellish conditions in the mills. So deafness is a recurring theme in the book as is unusual emotional longing which again seems to be a side effect from the silk.
I laughed at one of the desperate plans to save the factory by adapting the silk to subdue workforces to make them compliant.
Just when I thought the book would fizzle out in the failure of the mill there was a reconnection to Henry’s past that made for an interesting finish.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the ARC

The Silence Factory is a standalone gothic suspense/ fantasy. It mainly follows the perspective of Henry Latimer, a widower employed to help Sir Edward Ashmore-Percy's deaf daughter. Henry is drawn into Sir Edward's business of selling magical spider silk fabric. There are also journal entries interspersed in between some of Henry's chapters which belong to Sophia Ashmore-Percy from decades prior when Sophia and her husband James arrived in Greece, searching for the spiders.

The world was unexpected - it is grounded in the past and the spider silk is both mystical yet believable. I thought it was a completely unique premise, and it was so interesting. I loved the dual effect of the silk and how it drove the story.

Because of the 1800s time period, Sophia's POVs use more formal, archaic language, however it didn't take me long to adjust and I found them authentic. The language and style didn't reduce my enjoyment of her chapters, and I was just as intrigued by her story as Henry's. At the start of the book, I was really rooting for both Sophia and Henry (and their relationships with Hira and Sir Edward), and then the plot properly kicked in. The development (or decline?) of the characters during the book was really well done. It was so gradual, creepy and atmospheric.

I'd like to specifically mention a trigger warning for baby loss. Although there are other more general trigger warnings for the gothic genre like mental health, baby loss is a specific one that may affect some readers.

I've had a bad run with gothic novels recently, with the last three I read all ending up with a three star rating, so I was starting to think that maybe it was just a me/gothic fiction incompatibility issue, but this grabbed me straight away. I read this book all in one go, basically without coming up for air because the plot had me completely gripped. I guess I thought that it was going to be more of a gothic romance, but once the story started to develop, I was just along for the ride and I loved it exactly as it was.

This was a completely original novel, and for once a book described as gothic truly hit the mark for me. It 100% committed to the story and to the genre, which set it apart for me. It's hard to go into more detail about my thoughts on this book without venturing into spoiler country and I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll just say that I think this book will stay with me for a while.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC from NetGalley, but this is my voluntary and honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book.
I haven’t read any of the author’s previous novels but found this book to be a work of magical Gothic style.
With two points of view woven through (of which I had more sympathy for Sophia’s tale) it tells the story of a unique silk created from a spider found only on a Greek island. The attitudes of wealthy men of the period towards women, indigenous people and the poor is deftly woven and there is a sense of comeuppance as the novel concludes. However, the ending felt a little contrived in terms of Henry’s revelation; a little disappointing after an immersive read.

I found this a very difficult book to read, full of disappointments. The subject matter was really interesting, a novel idea.....but the backstory of mysogeny and greed: the husband who cares not a jot for the emotional misery of his wife, nor the indigenous community, their beliefs and sacred wildlife made the pleasure of the book far less than it might have been.
The continuing story over following generations was tainted by similar traits. Yes, our lives aren't easy, but the book left me feeling quite despon - perhaps just a case of too much reality in one sitting.

This was not what I was expecting when I started to read and i have to say that it was not my scene at all as the story was too much fantasy for me However it is well written and when I was 80% of the way through th story I suddenly wanted to keep reading to discover the ending. Becuse of the way that this is written and the fact that I believe that if fantasy had been my read then my dislike of it means that instead of 3 stars I give it 4 stars as I believe that it deserves recognition

I loved Bridget Collins’ last two novels so much I was almost nervous to read this one in case it didn’t live up to my feverish expectations. I was wrong: in THE SILENCE FACTORY she has created another world that exists on the edge of time and magic. Epic in scope and rich at sentence level, this is storytelling at its most immersive.