Quiet After Dark

Fifteen-year-old Noor Halloran has one rule: be quiet after dark. For two years the Hush, a sickness that steals your words, then your memories, then you, has been kept out of Cornwall behind the Tamar Line. Then it slips through. When a Hushed neighbour scratches her nine-year-old brother Sami, Noor has thirty days before he forgets her name.

Their only hope is a voice on Grandad’s old shortwave radio: Mum, a scientist working hundreds of miles north in Orkney, whispering every Thursday night, “I think there’s a way back.”

So Noor runs. With a battered green notebook where she writes down every word Sami loses, she crosses moors in the dark and travels the canals on a blue narrowboat run by a dying old man. She takes the snowbound railway over Ribblehead Viaduct and crawls under the Firebreak, the great fence that splits the country in two. With her go a sharp-tongued girl in a wheelchair, a nurse searching for her son, a boy who betrays them, a stray lurcher and a silent girl who hums her nana’s lullaby. Behind them comes Captain Kane, who never stops hunting.

Every day Sami forgets a little more. And the people who hold the cure have already decided who deserves to remember.

A story about a sister, a brother, and the words we keep for the people we love.