Publication Date: July 1, 2025
A mother’s love can be deafening . . .
Isaac is Hannah’s entire world. She knows that her son is gifted, and that those gifts make him vulnerable. To keep him safe, she spends every waking moment by his side. If she lets her guard down, lets him out of her sight, lets him show what he’s capable of, he will be taken from her.
When the Soundfield arrived twenty years ago, the world changed with it. Now, people are forced to live at night due to the deadly heat of the day, food and water are scarce, and everyday life is punctuated by the constant and disconcerting hum from the Field. A brilliant scientist, Hannah spent her early career working on the enigma of the Soundfield, looking for answers; now, resigned, she has focussed all her energies on keeping Isaac living, not just alive.
To do so, she will have to lie to the people she knows and hope she can trust the ones she doesn’t. Because the only thing more dangerous than her lies, is the truth of what she has done.
A woman’s determination to protect her son means going up against formidable enemies.
Set in a dystopian world where civilization must flip day and night due to deadly heat, The Quiet introduces a bizarre enigma of the Soundfield. Author Barnaby Martin flexes his creativity with the Soundfield, which has covered the sky, impacted the weather, and emits strange sounds.
Fans of post-apocalyptic fiction will probably find the story quite engaging. Meanwhile, I struggled trying to get my bearings. The more I read, the more questions I had.
There’s a past/present shift that provides a bit of clarity regarding Hannah’s desperation to keep her son, Isaac, at her side. I struggled to understand some of the scientific principles, particularly Hannah’s research into the Soundfield.
However, Hannah’s intense anxiety about keeping Isaac safe is clearly depicted. The plot twist gave me an unexpected jolt, leaving me unprepared for the ending.
The Quiet delivers an unsettling story centering around a single mother’s efforts to protect her child.
Barnaby Martin is a multi-talented storyteller and creator. Besides his writing, he is an award-winning and self-taught composer, video essayist and teacher. His music has been performed widely in the UK and internationally by groups including the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of Opera North and Westminster Cathedral Choir. His YouTube channel, Listening In, which he began in 2019 and for which he makes videos that explore the cross-section between pop culture and classical music, has garnered over 200,000 subscribers and ten million views. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and now teaches in London, where he lives with his husband.
