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A Granite Silence: a mesmerising historical novel about a notorious true crime case
Nina Allan
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A Granite Silence is an exploration - a journey through time to a particular house, in a particular street, Urquhart Road, Aberdeen in 1934, where eight-year-old Helen Priestly lives with her mother and father.
Among this long, grey corridor of four-storey tenements, a daunting expanse of granite, working families are squashed together like pickled herrings in their narrow flats. Here are Helen's neighbours: the Topps, the Josses, the Mitchells, the Gordons, the Donalds, the Coulls and the Hunts.
Returning home from school for her midday meal, Helen is sent by her mother Agnes to buy a loaf from the bakery at the end of the street. Agnes never sees her daughter alive again.
Nina Allan explores the aftermath of Helen's disappearance, turning a probing eye to the close-knit neighbourhood - where everyone knows everyone, at least by sight - and with subtlety and sympathy, explores the intricate layers of truth and falsehood that can coexist in one moment of history.
Full of echoes, allusions and eerie diversions, A Granite Silence is an investigation into a notorious true crime case, but also a stylish, imaginative inquiry into who gets to tell a story, how it is told, and why.
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Praise for A Granite Silence: a mesmerising historical novel about a notorious true crime case
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A Granite Silence is a masterpiece [of true crime fiction], so good it makes me wonder if there is a better writer than Nina Allan in Britain today?The murder in Aberdeen in 1934 of eight-year-old Helen Priestley horrified the nation and had a shattering impact on the over-crowded tenement community where she lived. In this closely researched account, Nina Allan creatively explores the many elements exposed by this dreadful crime. - The Herald, 10 Books to Read This MonthNina Allan takes this notorious real-life case and weaves around it an extraordinary blend of forensic research and imaginative fiction. It all adds up to a wonderfully immersive portrait of a place and a time, and the awful ease with which ordinary lives can tip into tragedy. - Mail on SundayNo ordinary work of true crime . . . A Granite Silence succeeds magnificently - TLSAllan moves seamlessly from present to past, from fact to fiction, in prose that is at once almost gratuitously clear and eerily provocative - The Tablet (Novel of the Week)
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