Rosamund Lupton's Blog

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‘Afternoon tea with Poole reading group was a wonderful opportunity to meet and talk to readers. One novel idea was cake & book pairings –  they recommended baked Alaska for ‘The Quality of Silence’ and ‘Angel Food Cake’ for Afterwards…’ – Rosamund Lupton 

FilmNation has set its sights on British author Rosamund Lupton’s latest best-selling novel,The Quality of Silence.

The production, financing and sales company has optioned film rights to the book, which hit stands in the U.S. last month following its publication in the U.K. in summer 2015. The female-centric story, both a psychological thriller and an investigation of motherhood and marriage, tells the story of a mother and her 10-year-old deaf daughter who embark on a treacherous journey through the Alaskan wilderness in search of the woman’s husband.

The hunt for a director and writer is currently underway. FilmNation was also involved with Room, another tale of female empowerment that was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture and won Brie Larson the Oscar for best actress.

“We’re thrilled to be in business with such a unique and powerful voice,” FilmNation said Wednesday in a statement. “Rosamund Lupton’s novel is an absolute page-turner steeped in rich characters.”

Glen Basner’s FilmNation continues to ramp up its in-house production efforts, in addition to remaining a leading foreign sales company that’s known for attracting top directors. Other FilmNation productions include The Founder, the upcoming biopic starring Michael Keaton as McDonald’s mogul Ray Kroc.

Lupton’s best-selling debut novel, Sister (2010), has sold more than 1.3 million copies worldwide and been translated into 30 languages. The acclaimed book spent time on the New York Times’best-seller list and was the fastest-selling debut novel in WH Smith’s history in the U.K.

Sylvie Rabineau at RWSG represented the film rights and negotiated the deal with co-agent Felicity Blunt at Curtis Brown UK.

By Pamela McClintock. Read the article here.

Mark Ruffalo promotes The Quality of Silence on Twitter to celebrate the US release of the book.

Read more about the book here.

Arriving in Alaska to confront her estranged husband, Yasmin and her precocious deaf daughter Ruby are instead told that the man they search for, Ruby’s father, has been killed in a terrible accident.

Unable to accept his death, the pair set out in a big-rig on the ice roads of the tundra, only to find that a very human danger might be stalking them through the dark as a storm closes in.

Such is the set-up for “The Quality of Silence,” Rosamund Lupton’s third novel.

There’s a lot to recommend about “Silence,” starting right from the basics: it’s a good story expertly told, populated by fully-developed characters and fueled with a combination of interpersonal drama and the high stakes of an uncovered conspiracy.

It takes real talent to showcase more than a hundred pages of people driving a dark highway without talking and still make it not only interesting, but often nail-bitingly intense, and Lupton delivers in spades.

Unique for the genre, the “thrill” of this thriller is rooted more strongly in the emotional conflict between family members both present and absent than it is in the external threat of a potential conspiracy.

Oh, the conspiracy is there – there’s a real danger stalking these women through the storm that keeps the tension high and steers the plot in unique and unexpected directions, but it’s not in the driver’s seat.

Instead, it’s playing navigator from the passenger side while the interpersonal drama takes the wheel, particularly the softly raging debate over whether Ruby – deaf since birth and preferring communication through sign language or computer – should be forced to communicate with her “real” voice to better fit in with her hearing classmates.

It’s an important issue for many who are hard of hearing and the resentment fostered between her and her mother as a result carries the heft of the dramatic weight.

From a technical standpoint, there’s a particularly impressive trick played with point-of-view.

Rather than being locked into a single perspective, the story bounces about in small scenes between the first-person narration of Ruby and the close third-person of the surrounding adults — usually Yasmin, but also local law enforcement, friendly truckers, and other supporting cast.

In less practiced hands this “head-hopping” would be an annoyance, a distraction that muddles the narrative and gets in the way of the story.

Here, it keeps the events fresh even while addressing exposition or backstory and helps to illustrate how the main conflict ultimately stems from Yasmin’s inability to comprehend her daughter’s world.

The use of digital media throughout also merits a mention, particularly the samples from Ruby’s creative (and sadly fictional) Twitter account “Words Without Sounds.”

These brief passages interspersed throughout the earlier chapters do a great deal in outlining Ruby’s emotions and provide additional atmosphere as the world-building settles around its narrative.

Too many authors lazily ignore modern technology where it might inconvenience their story, so to see it so well integrated is a fantastic change.

The few hiccups are mostly minor setting details that arise from the gap between research (which Lupton offers in abundance) and first-hand experience.

So, no deal breakers, especially since Lupton’s Alaska is closer to the real thing than a lot of what we see from the Outside.

“The Quality of Silence” comes absolutely recommended, offering thrills and family drama in equal measure along with some important real-world issues and emotion strong enough to take your breath away.

It hits US shelves on Feburary 16th, and shouldn’t be missed.

Addley Fannin is a freelance writer and graduate student in Northern studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She can be reached at addleyfannin@gmail.com, on Twitter: @addleyfannin or on Tumblr atadelinecappuccino.tumblr.com.

Read the review on News Miner’s website here.

THE QUALITY OF SILENCE
Into the Alaskan tundra

BookPage review by Barbara Clark

What would you do if you were Yasmin, a brainy London astrophysicist, and your filmmaker husband was missing and presumed dead after a tragic accident in northern Alaska, where the frigid air and deepest black of night reduce survival odds to near zero? Author Rosamund Lupton offers up one frightening scenario in The Quality of Silence, a tight, claustrophobic thriller that will enclose readers in a world of cold from which there’s no escape.

The Alaskan authorities have unsuccessfully tried to convince Yasmin that her husband, Matt, is dead, and they’re calling off their search in the remote village of Anaktue, 200 miles north in the Alaska wilds where Matt was last staying. What’s more, his wedding ring has been found in the burned-out wreckage of this Eskimo settlement where a terrible explosion has wiped the place clean of anything that lives.

To those of us comfortably ensconced in our easy chairs, Yasmin’s response may seem crazy. She has no one she trusts to stay with her 10-year-old daughter, Ruby, who’s been deaf since birth, so against all reason, she and Ruby set out into the silent, endless snow in search of Matt, in the teeth of a blinding storm.

Nature, however, is not the only enemy. Anaktue is also at the center of activity for hydraulic fracturing mega-companies and big-money natural gas interests, and some very powerful human adversaries are out to stop Yasmin from reaching the village. And who, besides a long-distance trucker or two, is willing to help her?

The author evokes a sense of absolute isolation that hovers at the edge of every scene. It’s the perfect metaphor for Ruby’s world of deafness, as mother and daughter find themselves marooned in the cab of a big rig truck, where headlights beating into the wall of snow make only a small bubble of light, and where even a voice on the radio seems like a reprieve. The youngster’s unique perspective often propels the narrative: “Sometimes you see a small sign in our headlights, and it’s just an arrow pointing right or pointing left and that means Mum knows to turn the steering wheel, otherwise we might just drive off into the sky.”

Lupton uses powerful, evocative language to craft a literary novel that sets a knife-edge of danger on every page, as readers follow mother and daughter through the forbidding landscape to a heart-stopping conclusion.

 Read the review on BookPage’s website here.

By Seattle Times staff

In Rosamund Lupton’s remarkable “The Quality of Silence” (Crown, 304 pp., $26), the silence of Alaska’s far reaches is very real for Ruby; she’s completely deaf. This precocious 10-year-old narrates much of the book, as she and her mother trade their comfortable lives in England for a headlong journey above the Arctic Circle, where it gets so cold your eyelids can instantly freeze shut.

They’re searching for their missing and presumed-dead husband and father, a wildlife filmmaker. They hitch rides in planes and trucks and, when one driver falls ill, Ruby’s resilient Mum teaches herself how to drive his rig. It’s not just the environment, with its storms, treacherous roads and deadly temperatures that could do them in; a menacing trucker is following them too.

Readers will need a boatload of suspended disbelief here. (For one thing, would a mother, no matter how desperate, really put her child in such mind-bendingly obvious danger?) Nonetheless, Lupton’s proven gift for making unlikely scenarios believable, and her sensitive depiction of family bonds, make “The Quality of Silence” a compelling and beautifully written journey into the darkest of hearts.

Read the review on Seattle Times’ website here.

The Quality of Silence has received a fantastic review from The Washington Post, drawing on parallels with “The Revenant”. Read more below.

A mother and daughter’s risky quest for truth in Alaska in ‘Quality of Silence’

By Carol Memmott February 10
Much like “The Revenant” and “The Hateful Eight,” Rosamund Lupton’s suspense novel “The Quality of Silence” pits its characters against a heartlessly cruel Mother Nature. Set on Alaska’s James W. Dalton Highway, the notorious stretch of road made famous by the History Channel’s “Ice Road Truckers,” the book centers on a mother-daughter pair searching for the girl’s missing father. It’s the dead of winter and dark 24 hours a day. The cold is so “mean” it will bite at your face “like a half-starved animal.”Amid these stark conditions Yasmin Alfredson and her 10-year-old daughter, Ruby, barrel down the Dalton in a 40-ton 18-wheeler. They’re making a run from Fairbanks to the road’s stopping point at the town of Deadhorse, near the Arctic Ocean. Not only is it Yasmin’s first time driving a big rig, but a polar storm is imminent. Seasoned truckers are warning over the CB radio that the pair is headed into a hellscape that’s bound to kill them, but they won’t turn back.

[Best mystery books and thrillers of 2015]

Never mind that an Alaska state trooper has told Yasmin that her husband, Matt, a wildlife filmmaker, was one of 24 people killed when a “catastrophic fire” engulfed a native village 35 miles from Deadwood, where he was working. The police have called off their search for survivors but Yasmin is convinced that Matt’s alive. She pays a trucker to drive them north, but bad luck strikes early on, and Yasmin finds herself behind the wheel. As if the weather isn’t enough of a threat, there’s also the menace of a tanker driver who seems to be following them.

About half of this teeth-chattering novel is narrated by the indomitable Ruby, who is profoundly deaf — and a model of girl power. She’s bullied at school for being different and on the outs with her only friend. Her parents are her anchor to self-esteem. Matt tells her to think about it this way: “It’s not that I’m deaf but I hear quietness.” She even has a Twitter account where she writes about words as only she can hear them. “WEIRD – Looks psychedelic; tastes dip-dab-sherbet-fizzy. “NOISE – Looks like flashing signs, neon-bright; feels like rubble falling; tastes like other people’s breathed-out air.” Her bravery, as the story unfolds, is enormous.

The quality of Ruby’s soundless world is juxtaposed against the deadly quiet of the Alaskan tundra. When the polar storm hits and when the sky and land seem to fuse into a single white entity, Yasmin pulls off the road to wait things out. The temperature outside the truck drops steadily and horrifyingly to minus-55 degrees, and the temperature in the truck cab to minus-4. The Alfredsons’ suffering seems unfathomable. Yet, like Hugh Glass in “The Revenant,” this mother-daughter team can’t be vanquished or stopped. In this tale, the deadly cold and treacherous road are no match for the fiery heat of enduring love.

Visit the article on The Washington Post website here.