Silence Is a Sense

By: Layla AlAmmar

Narrated by: Laura Sawahla

Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

"This is not just good storytelling, but a blueprint for survival." —The New York Times Book Review

A transfixing and beautifully rendered novel about a refugee’s escape from civil war—and the healing power of community.

A young woman sits in her apartment, watching the small daily dramas of her neighbors across the way. She is an outsider, a mute voyeur, safe behind her windows, and she sees it all—the sex, the fights, the happy and unhappy families. Journeying from her war-torn Syrian homeland to this unnamed British city has traumatized her into silence, and her only connection to the world is the magazine column she writes under the pseudonym “the Voiceless,” where she tries to explain the refugee experience without sensationalizing it—or revealing anything about herself.

Gradually, though, the boundaries of her world expand. She ventures to the corner store, to a bookstore and a laundromat, and to a gathering at a nearby mosque. And it isn’t long before she finds herself involved in her neighbors’ lives. When an anti-Muslim hate crime rattles the neighborhood, she has to make a choice: Will she remain a voiceless observer, or become an active participant in a community that, despite her best efforts, is quickly becoming her own?

Layla AlAmmar, a Kuwaiti American writer and student of Arab literature, delivers here a brilliant and affecting story about memory, revolution, loss, and safety. Most of all, and with melodic prose, Silence Is a Sense reminds us just how fundamental human connection is to survival.

©2021 Layla AlAmmar (P)2022 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

A Most-Anticipated Book of 2021: Bustle * Ms. Magazine * The Millions * Electric Lit * SheReads

“Silence Is a Sense is a fierce novel. The prose is ferocious, the pace is ferocious and the beguiling central character, known as The Voiceless, conceals behind her inability—or reluctance — to speak, a striking, visceral intensity. She obsessively watches the people around her to silence her own trauma, but every now and then it can’t help but break through. Layla AlAmmar has skillfully woven a narrative of memory and grief with an illuminating social critique of the position of asylum seekers within contemporary British society. It is daring and devastating." — Fiona Mozley, author of Hot Stew and Booker finalist Elmet

“A fascinating approach to the refugee crisis… Compelling and original.” — The Guardian

“[An] urgent and essential addition to the literature of exile that will deepen our understanding of others—and ourselves.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

Being in the skin of the protagonist.

Layla tells this story so well you can’t help but to be feeling and witnessing the events she portrays in her book “Syrian Senses” Thank goodness she weaves her story in the way she does. Sometime she is in Syria when she is able to live a somewhat normal life, then horror beyond belief in Syria. The harrowing tale of finding and being subject to the cold and viscous handling by the smugglers. All this is interspersed with her story of living as an immigrant in England where she is able to mostly get us away from the horrors she has suffered.