The silence : a novel

Summary: It is 1997, and in a basement flat in Hackney, Isla Green is awakened by a call in the middle of the night: her father, Joe, phoning from Sydney. It seems that thirty years ago, the Greens' next-door neighbour Mandy disappeared. Joe claims he thought Mandy had moved away with her husband, but now Mandy's family is trying to reconnect, and there is no trace of her. Joe was allegedly the last person to see her alive, and now he's under suspicion of murder. So Isla returns to Australia for the first time in a decade to support her father and search for the truth. Her arrival in Sydney brings up echoes from the past, taking us back to the heat of summer 1967, when two young couples lived side by side on a quiet street by the sea. The more questions Isla asks, the more she learns about the secrets each marriage bore. Could her father have done something terrible? How much does her mother know? At the center of it all lies a shameful practice rooted in Australia's colonial past: the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families, children known as the Stolen Generation.