It lacked exploration, I didn't feel any depth in the characters, and in particular I had no major affiliation towards any of them. A tour de force from a spectacular storyteller, it will have you gripped from the first page to the last, but it will stay with you long after that as well. The night they host a party for Keelin’s birthday, a huge storm hits Inisrún and ensures that no one can enter or leave the island. The cold case peaks the interest of a pair of Australian filmmakers, who travel to the island to make a documentary about what happened, aiming to finally crack it.

As was the case with her Asking For It, O'Neill uses her fiction as a vehicle for increasing our understanding of a phenomenon that deserves more understanding (not to mention more public funding). I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Henry’s mother was born on Inisrún, but having grown up in a privileged British family Henry has a complicated relationship with the island and Ireland. While I understand that the story is set in a part of Ireland where Irish is the primary spoken language, many readers are not proficient in such a language so for them it is completely foreign. After the Silence also touches upon why it is women in particular who read/consume stories about true crime and crime fiction, especially when the stories are also concerning women - and why is the media so drawn to a particular type of woman (young, white, slim, beautiful) when it comes to telling these stories.But the tender moments in this book that showed Keelin and Alex talking Irish to one another was just lovely, and added an extra element to the book for me that I loved a lot. Her every relationship seems toxic and abusive, whether by outright violence or more insidious coercive control.

Billed as a psychological thriller, After the Silence is a crime novel but not an entirely conventional one. As a wild party takes place at a big house on the remote Irish island of Inisrún, a violent storm cuts the inhabitants and partygoers off from the mainland.Later, as the family gathers to watch the final documentary cut, nervously awaiting the fall-out on Twitter, Henry observes, 'It's the era we’re living in, you see. This works well as a narrative device, as their interviewees give us some important background on the key characters, and offer different versions of the events in question. In this bold, brilliant, disturbing new novel Louise O'Neill shows that deadly secrets are devastating to those who hold them close. Now a documentary team of two from Australia have arrived to hopefully shed some light on that fateful night in an attempt to uncover what really happened. In this bold, brilliant, disturbing new novel, Louise O'Neill shows that deadly secrets are devastating to those who hold them close.