Silent People: Hearing the Call of the Dodder [Hardcover]

"Silent People explores the intriguing privacy of other people's experience and reminds us that human experience is so intricately layered that it sometimes defies our normal ranges of perception." Dr Terri Apter, psychologist and writer "A haunting tale which echoes in the mind long after the book has been put down." Judie Newman, Fellow of the English Association

SILENT PEOPLE Hearing the Call of the Dodder is about the silent people who wander among us looking lost, as if they don't quite belong, but don't know how to leave; who 'struggle all their lives, to fit into a world... that feels entirely alien to them, if not downright hostile.' Hebe, who also struggles to fit in, feels drawn to the silent people and yet, 'I could hardly bear to watch them sometimes, knowing what I did about their plight...' She is haunted by memories of Silas, the 'wild dodder boy', who befriended her when she was a child in Dodder's Well. She lost touch with him a long time ago after a disastrous flood and is always watching the river in the hope of seeing him again. Now, returning to her childhood haunts, she finds his home is under threat. The dodders are a hidden race of people who live in the hills and glens around Dodder's Well. Their name comes from the dodder plant, a slender, leafless, parasitic vine which twines itself around its host before producing its tiny flowers. Hebe's story wanders the borders of fact and fantasy, of science and art, of sanity and madness, as she catches glimpses of the magic that draws the silent people back to their ancient roots.

Silent People: Hearing the Call of the Dodder is about keeping secrets and feeling out-of-place in the world and seeing things other people cannot see.

It is about the gulf that exists between people who interpret the same facts in very different ways.

It is about the silent people who inhabit this gulf, this no-man's-land, this space between worlds.

The elusive river boy of this story is one of the dodder people, a hidden race that lives secretly among us.

"A haunting tale which echoes in the mind long after the book has been put down."
Judie Newman, Fellow of the English Association

"Silent People explores the intriguing privacy of other people's experience and reminds us that human experience is so intricately layered that it sometimes defies our normal ranges of perception."
Dr Terri Apter, psychologist and writer

Yvonne Jerrold was born in Washington D.C. of an Irish mother and a French/British father, and was educated in Dublin and Cambridge. She worked as an architect before taking up writing full time, and now lives in Cambridgeshire where she is planting a small woodland of native trees in what was previously a ploughed field. You can see its progress on her website.