Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for The Unheard by Anne Worthington. My thanks to Helen at Helen Richardson PR for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Cōnfingō for my review copy.

The Unheard is a book that has been wowing readers. If you don’t believe me, check out this fabulous review by Linda at Linda’s Book Bag.

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About the Book

Tom Pullan knows that the people who visit him are trying to tell him something, but he cannot remember what. He knows the faces in his memory, the ones he loved, are not the ones around him now.

We are drawn into a world where brutal events from the past lie just below the surface. Plunged inside the characters’ heads, we experience their thoughts and feelings: sorrow and rage they cannot share; the intense feelings and turbulent sexuality of a teenage girl; a boy who saw something that casts a long shadow over his life.

What do we do with a lifetime of unheard truths, questions and fears? The Unheard is a novel about memory, and what happens to the experiences that are too much for us but we are unable to leave behind.

Format: Paperback (160 pages) Publisher: Confingo Publishing
Publication date: 11th July 2023 Genre: Literary Fiction

Find The Unheard on Goodreads

Purchase links 
Publisher | Amazon UK 
Links provided for convenience only, not as part of an affiliate programme

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My Review

Tom has dementia and May, his wife of many years, is seriously ill. They’d always promised each other they’d stay together to the end but now this seems it might not be possible. Tom forgets a lot these days, like what time it is or whether he’s had his tea. But there have also been things in his life that he couldn’t forget even though he wanted to, like his experiences during the war. And, as a child, there were things he was told he must forget, terrible things that he didn’t fully understand at the time. If your heart hasn’t been broken a little bit by the end of the first part of the book then prepare for it to have been torn asunder by the end. (Please can someone invent a way to reach into a book and give the characters a hug.)

Moving back in time, alongside depicting events in Tom’s life, the book explores social and political issues such as economic injustice and digital exclusion, particularly during the section of the book set in 1984, a time of industrial unrest in the UK. Tom has a visceral reaction to the person he calls ‘that woman’ (Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) and has no truck with the theory of ‘trickle down’ economics. As he says, ‘When have the rich allowed their money to spill over for the rest of us? And when has money ever flowed down to the poor?’. Quite, Tom.

The experiences of Maggie, his teenage daughter, are raw and disturbing but demonstrate that there are many ways to be, or feel, unheard.

Being inside Tom’s head is often unsettling and heartrending but at other times his resilience and determination to do the best for his family make it joyous.

The writing is wonderful. Even when the author is describing pain or despair, there’ll be a phrase that makes you stop and think, yes, that must be what it’s like – or even, I know that feeling. I especially loved the use of repetition, the phrases that occur in Tom’s head over and over again, like a refrain.

The Unheard is one of those books that it’s difficult to do justice to in a review and I don’t think I’ve come close to communicating how brilliant I thought it was. It’s a short book but it packs a real punch. And after this I don’t think I’ll ever think about the song ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine’ in quite the same way again.

In three words: Moving, powerful, lyrical

Try something similar: Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry

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About the Author

Anne Worthington is a documentary photographer and writer. She was awarded an MA with Distinction for Creative Writing in 2018. Anne was a finalist for Iceland Writers Retreat 2015, and shortlisted for the Fish Flash Fiction Prize 2018. She lives in the north of England. The Unheard is her first novel.

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