Music and Silence

In a slightly shabby house in a once-genteel section of London, two women meet. Each is scarred by emotional wounds suffered in childhood. Each has cut herself off from ordinary existence. Maud - who is music - is a twenty-six-year-old cellist in retreat from a highly promising career after a disastrous love affair with her teacher and mentor. Beatrice - who is silence - is a forty-year-old physician drawn out of her self-imposed, saintlike isolation by Maud's predicament. Into their lives comes Arthur, a half-crazed religious fanatic, bringing with him destruction wrought in the name of God, as he inexorably propels this rich and compelling novel to its shocking conclusion.