Deafening Silence

Fighting the Battle Within

Daniel Shaw is a modern-day warrior who served in Afghanistan with honour and pride until a hostile engagement with the enemy left him profoundly deaf and medically discharged. Now, in the months leading up to Remembrance Day he is plagued by fragmented nightmares about the incident and consumed by a volcanic rage that constantly bubbles beneath the surface of his controlled exterior. His children are afraid of him, he becomes increasingly paranoid that his wife is cheating, and he receives scant assistance from the institutional services that are supposed to be helping him transition back into civilian life.

Consequently, he struggles to hold onto his job and when his father passes away suddenly and unexpectedly, he loses his moral compass. Yet pride forbids him to ask for help and so he becomes increasingly unstable and self-destructive. Finally, as the nation observes a minute of silence on Remembrance Day in honour of those who died in the line of duty, Daniel is faced with a decision: surrender his pride and ask for help or relinquish his life to the war that continues to rage inside his mind.

• Format: novel

• Genre: contemporary fiction/trauma fiction

• Pages: tbc