Silence Is a Sense

By: Layla AlAmmar

Narrated by: Laura Sawahla

"This is not just good storytelling, but a blueprint for survival." —The New York Times Book Review

A transfixing and beautifully rendered novel about a refugee’s escape from civil war—and the healing power of community.

A young woman sits in her apartment, watching the small daily dramas of her neighbors across the way. She is an outsider, a mute voyeur, safe behind her windows, and she sees it all—the sex, the fights, the happy and unhappy families. Journeying from her war-torn Syrian homeland to this unnamed British city has traumatized her into silence, and her only connection to the world is the magazine column she writes under the pseudonym “the Voiceless,” where she tries to explain the refugee experience without sensationalizing it—or revealing anything about herself. Gradually, though, the boundaries of her world expand. She ventures to the corner store, to a bookstore and a laundromat, and to a gathering at a nearby mosque. And it isn’t long before she finds herself involved in her neighbors’ lives. When an anti-Muslim hate crime rattles the neighborhood, she has to make a choice: Will she remain a voiceless observer, or become an active participant in a community that, despite her best efforts, is quickly becoming her own?

Layla AlAmmar, a Kuwaiti American writer and student of Arab literature, delivers here a brilliant and affecting story about memory, revolution, loss, and safety. Most of all, and with melodic prose, Silence Is a Sense reminds us just how fundamental human connection is to survival.

Being in the skin of the protagonist.

Layla tells this story so well you can’t help but to be feeling and witnessing the events she portrays in her book “Syrian Senses” Thank goodness she weaves her story in the way she does. Sometime she is in Syria when she is able to live a somewhat normal life, then horror beyond belief in Syria. The harrowing tale of finding and being subject to the cold and viscous handling by the smugglers. All this is interspersed with her story of living as an immigrant in England where she is able to mostly get us away from the horrors she has suffered.