In the summer of 1914 Alec Marquand has just graduated from college and has been hired by the lord of a remote country estate in the Scottish Highlands to survey the ancient Iron Age brochs that lie on his property. Once there Alec comes upon a small island which is called Eileen Tosdach--the Island of Silence. Just as Alec makes his amazing find, he is shipped off to war, sent to storm the beaches of Gallipoli. From the author of the Booker shortlisted The Industry of Souls , this is a gripping tour through one man's hell in search of a path for redemption. “Haunting...quickly sucks the reader in....It's impossible not to be moved.” ― The Washington Post Book World “The book's strength comes from a well-orchestrated sense of mystery that pulls us into the story and continually keeps us off balance....Written with an admirably contained fury.” ― Newsday “As emotionally stark as it is magnetic...Compelling and, ultimately, illuminating.” ― Denver Post “[A] haunting new novel....Islands of Silence cuts to the quick. It is a powerful meditation on the sanctity of life and the devastation of war. Particularly at this juncture in world affairs, its resonance is profound. Read it and weep.” ― Seattle Post-Intelligencer Praise for Martin Booth's" Industry of Souls "As we accompany Bayliss on a tour through his present and past, this meditative, unadorned novel, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1998, raises questions about home, freedom, and the meaning of a life that resonate long after the final page is turned." --"The New York Times Book Review "This is often lyrical and nimble, and accomplishes the not insignificant task of entertaining and enlightening by means of literary narrative."--"The Boston Book Review "This fabric of contrasts is astonishing, as accomplished as anything in recent fiction. . . . Booth has created a world in which the best and the worst of life not only exist side by side but are inextricably linked--a world perhaps not unlike our own."--"The Seattle Times ""The Industry of Souls surpasses other novels that rest in depicting the many horrors of gulag life." --"Atlanta Journal-Constitution Martin Booth (1944-2004) was the bestselling author of novels including Hiroshima Joe, Islands of Silence , and The Industry of Souls , which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another novel, A Very Private Gentlemen , was adapted into the 2010 movie, The American, starring George Clooney. He also wrote several nonfiction books, including Cannabis: A History, Opium: A History , and the memoir Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood . Booth was born in England, but spent much of his childhood in Hong Kong, a location that would deeply inspire his writing. He moved back to England at the age of 20, and started his literary career as a poet. He worked as a schoolmaster, a job he held until 1985, when the success of Hiroshima Joe allowed him to devote himself full-time to his writing. At the time of his death in 2004, he was living in Devon, England. Islands of Silence By Martin Booth Picador Copyright © 2003 Martin Booth All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-312-42332-2 CHAPTER 1 Over the last few weeks, the young doctor with responsibility for my case has been studiously examining me. He has meticulously collected blood samples and urine specimens, X-rayed and probed me, attached me to several pieces of complex electronic equipment and, from time to time, had one of the orderlies sit with me in the evening, as I fell asleep. Or so I led them to believe. Once I was breathing gently, the orderly departed and I spent the remainder of my waking hours in my precious solitude. This morning, armed with a black plastic clipboard, the doctor came to visit me as I sat at my window. Announcing his presence with a gentle knock on the door, he entered slowly. I sensed a certain tentativeness in his step. 'Good morning, Alec,' he said, pulling over the chair from my desk and sitting to my right. He shuffled briefly through the papers on the clipboard and I could tell this was not so much to retrieve information as to delay his next sentence. 'I have received back the results of some of our tests.' I, of course, showed no sign of having heard him and have to admit to admiring his perseverance. For months now, since he took on my case, he has spoken to me as if he expected a reply, yet in the full and certain knowledge that the chances of my uttering a single syllable in response were as great as the stars in the hemisphere of the southern sky. Again, he fumbled with his papers. 'I'm afraid I have some unsettling news.' Were I not a man of silence, I should have laughed. 'In general terms, you are in remarkably good health for your age. ...' The farcicality of it! Here was I, old beyond my luck, being told by a man of the white cloth with a fresh demeanour unsullied by time, and possessing but a microscopic fragment of my experience of the vagaries of existence, that my days we