Children Of Silence

Dec 1, 2025 8:17 AM

Author:Michael Wood

Children Of Silence

In this absorbing series of essays Michael Wood probes and plays with the dilemmas of twentieth century fiction - the myth of lost paradise, lost certainties, the suspension between contrary ideals, the lure of fantasy, the quest for the silence beneath speech. Wood's net is cast wide, from fables to novels, and he takes due account of personal and political context and of wider cultural and critical currents, noting fiction's swerving resistance to `history'. A superb essay on Roland Barthes is juxtaposed with a dissection of Beckett's prose comedy; an investigation of three Cuban writers -Cortazar, Cabrera Infante and Arenas - is followed by illuminating essays on Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino. In the second half of the book, the exploration of time, form and fantasy, and of the break with modernism, continues in studies of Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster and Jeanette Winterson. Rich with pleasures, spiked with insights, provocative and satisfying, this is one of the most exciting explorations of contemporary literature in recent years.

Reviews

A triumph of imaginative reading over received opinion; I was sad to finish it

—— Candia McWilliam , Independent on Sunday

One of the very few critical books I know can be read for pure pleasure as well as enlightenment

—— John Banville , Irish Times

Wood's book is an invitation to dialogue...so full of memorable and wise formulations that one is tempted to quote and go on quoting.

—— Gabriel Josopovici , T.L.S

Bold, playful, smart and lively

—— Time Out

An epic, polyphonic juggernaut of a novel. Ambitious, skilfully plotted, and full of wonderful surprises. I was hooked from the very first page

—— Tahmima Anam, author of A Golden Age

A compelling tale that weaves together the profound and the playful, the modern and the traditional, the secular and the mythological - all the strands that make up today's India

—— Manil Suri, author of The Death of Vishnu

Alice Albinia writes with tender acuity, and without illusions, of her characters' foibles. She brings that same unsparing, illuminating gaze to bear upon Delhi and India in this wise and lovely novel

—— Amit Chaudhuri

A talent to look out for

—— Stephanie Cross , Daily Mail

Love, betrayal, war and peace charge this powerful debut

—— Fanny Blake , Woman & Home

Tillyard writes in fluid, largely understated prose and her descriptions are wonderful

—— Lucy Atkins , Sunday Times

Tillyard is a fluent and attractive chronicler of detail and some of her imaginative liberties are ingenious

—— Jane Shilling , Sunday Telegraph

This saga of lives swept up in the Peninsular War recalls Georgette Heyer at her best...impossible to put down

—— Kate Saunders , Saga

A thrilling romance brought to life with exquisite detail

—— Prima

A prodigious talent able to combine meticulous research with novelistic devices...there is much to enjoy and admire

—— Norma Clarke , Times Literary Supplement

Fluently written and impeccably researched

—— The Lady

Gripping

—— Easy Living

It is time we stopped thinking of the historical novel as a genre, and an inferior one at that. If its ostensible subject matter means that it doesn't attempt to tell us how we live now, nevertheless a novel set back in time may, if it is good, say as much about what it is to be alive as one set in the next street or another country today. Tides of War is such a novel. It is diverting, but not a diversion

—— The Spectator

A well written, engaging read...beautifully observed

—— History Today

A vivid account of a couple of years in the Peninsula Campaign and a sympathetic portrait of those left behind

—— Joanna Hines , Literary Review

A delicious novel by an experienced author who captures the scientific atmosphere of the early 19th century with a devastating study of infidelity

—— Colin Gardiner , Oxford Times

The real life players of the Napoleonic era spring to life

—— i

Compelling

—— Big Issue

Highly assured and almost educational with its broad sweep of history

—— Jane Housham , Guardian

Tillyard’s achievement is in this original portray log the Regency era and its relevance to our own time

—— Philippa Williams , The Lady

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