SILENT NOON

A story of displacement, disinheritance – and the lingering past.

September 1953. Fourteen-year-old Barney Holland is promised a fresh start when he is offered a place at a boarding school on the remote North Sea island of Lindsey. Instead, he is shunned by his peers both for his status as a charity pupil and for being the replacement of a recently deceased student, the popular Cray. The arrival of Belinda Flood, a housemaster’s daughter stigmatized by her expulsion from another school, provides Barney with an unexpected ally. Both outsiders soon fall under the influence of charismatic senior pupil, Ivor Morrell, who reigns over the forbidden corners of the school: an abandoned fallout shelter and a haunted basement corridor. A gruesome find and the friendship with a local woman draw the three into an increasingly dangerous web of personal and social shame.

Gripped by mounting horror at his discovery of secrets harboured by the isolated school community, Barney personifies the struggle of a young peace-time generation finding its way out of the shadow of war. A shocking climax reveals a lurking threat more immediate than he’d imagined, adding even greater urgency to his desire to escape the island – and its haunted past – once and for all.

Trilby Kent's first novel for children, Medina Hill, was published by Tundra Books in Canada and the U.S. in October 2009. A second, Stones For My Father, appeared in 2011; it won the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award in 2012. Her first novel for adults, Smoke Portrait, was published in the U.K. by Alma Books in 2011. Trilby was born in Toronto and grew up in London, Miami and Boston. A graduate of Oxford University and the LSE, she has worked as a rare books specialist at a leading auction house, a freelance journalist contributing investigative, arts and feature writing to the Canadian national press and publications in America and Europe, an academic editor, and a creative writing tutor with one of the UK's leading distance learning schools.