About the Book
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 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.
Format: ebook (352 pages) Publisher: riverrun
Publication date: 10th April 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction
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My Review
In A Granite Silence the author takes a very different approach from many other historical novels based on true crime cases. Although, in fictional form, the facts of the case from the crime itself through the investigation, identification of the culprit and eventual trial are described, there’s great inventiveness in the way this is done.
The author takes the reader on a series of journeys exploring the social environment, the early lives of Helen’s mother and father, as well as those who interact in various ways with the Priestly family such as neighbours, teachers, etc. These are a combination of fact and fiction in varying degrees. In some cases they are almost completely a flight of the author’s imagination perhaps sparked by a particular real life character, an object or event.
As well as the author’s own commentary on her research, three other female characters with an interest in the case appear, a theme common to all being that of digression. There’s Rose, a journalist who moves into an Aberdeen apartment hoping to write a book about the Priestly case but who becomes intrigued by the story of the apartment’s previous occupant. Then there’s Pearl who, like the author, has set out to write a historical novel about Helen’s death but becomes distracted by the need to resolve a personal mystery. Lastly there’s Susana, a Russian author for whom the Priestly case inspires a work of experimental fiction.
I admired the author’s inventive approach although there were times the book went off at too much of a tangent for me and I struggled with its disjointed structure. For example, I confess to skimming a lengthy chapter about Robert Burns’s epic poem Tam o’ Shanter just because Helen wore a blue tam o’shanter hat. Characters come and go, some storylines finish in dead ends and the narrative moves back and forth in time. That’s either going to spark your interest or test your powers of concentration, possibly your patience.
As the investigation progresses, particularly the forensic analysis, details of the crime emerge that are shocking in nature. Is it prurient to want to know this sort of detail? Would we, like so many people at the time, jump to a conclusion about the person responsible? Would we treat a refusal to answer questions – the ‘granite silence’ of the book’s title – as evidence of guilt?
At one point, the author acknowledges her desire for knowledge, albeit in a different context but I think applicable to her approach in this book. ‘As always, I want to know more. I want to discover the personalities and predicaments at the heart of the case, to get to know their history at a level that does them justice.’
A Granite Silence is not a novel with a linear structure. Think of it more as an exploration of the different ways in which true crime stories can be told.
In three words: Inventive, discursive, original
Try something similar: The Mouthless Dead by Anthony Quinn
About the Author
Nina Allan is a novelist and critic. In 2018 she was named as one of the Guardian‘s Fresh Voices: 50 Writers You Should Read Now. She is the recipient of the British Science Fiction Award, the Kitschies Red Tentacle and the Grand Prix de L’imaginaire. In 2025 her novel The Good Neighbours was awarded the Prix Medicis Etranger. Her most recent novel is A Granite Silence, a historical true crime mystery. The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, written together with her husband Christopher Priest, is published by Bloomsbury Continuum in 2026.
Connect with Nina
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