Mara Keane returns to Greybridge in the northern dales after her father, the last bell-ringer of St. Bartholomew's, dies and leaves her a brass key and a shoebox of cassettes. The town is split by the Quietus, a river so eerily soundless it's become both legend and wound. Elias Noor, a soft-spoken sound archivist hauling a battered field recorder, believes the Quietus isn't quiet at all—only muted by a bargain the town refuses to name. Together they climb the mill steps, rewind tapes that smell of damp, and search for the note that could wake the water.
As a drought lowers the river, the silt offers up coins, bicycle frames, and stones hammered with the names of those who vanished the night the dam gates first closed in 1987. The cracked bell of St. Bartholomew's, wrapped for decades in felt, waits in the dark tower. Mara's choice to ring it will either unmoor the town's careful silence or stitch a new soundscape from grief, love, and stubborn memory. Crossing the river, she and Elias discover that every hush has a frequency—and every pact, a price.
Abby Brown (b. 1982) is a British novelist and essayist whose work explores sound, landscape, and community memory. Raised in Nottinghamshire, she studied social anthropology and sound studies at the University of Manchester before producing community radio in Leeds and cataloging oral histories in West Yorkshire archives. Her previous books include the story collection Salt in the Speaker (2016) and the novella The Latchkey Fog (2019). She lives in Hebden Bridge with her wife and a retired greyhound.
Beautiful sentences and a river-as-character I adored, but the pacing waded rather than flowed—I skimmed some of the tape transcripts.
Atmosférica y delicada. Greybridge vive en sus silencios, y el río Quietus es un personaje más, cargado de memoria. Me encantó la relación entre Mara y Elias, con su grabadora vieja y las cintas que huelen a moho. El detalle de la campana envuelta en fieltro y la torre oscura me persiguió días.
Hay partes lentas, sí, pero cuando la sequía baja el río y aparecen las piedras con nombres de 1987, todo cobra un sentido brutal. El pacto de silencio no es melodrama; es duelo. Al final, el sonido que eligen importa tanto como las palabras que callan.
I can still feel the last ring of that cracked bell in my chest—devastating and tender and perfect.
There's a gorgeous patience here. Brown uses the cassettes Mara inherits to braid memory and rumor, and Elias's fieldwork felt authentically nerdy in the best way.
Middle third drags slightly during the oral-history interludes with the mill families, but the drought reveal—the names hammered into stones when the dam first closed in 1987—snapped me back upright. I loved the little details: the felt-wrapped bell, the key left in a mug on the windowsill, the church tower steps that make your knees sing.
The ending earns its resonance. When the bell finally matters, it isn't spectacle; it's community. Quiet book, loud heart.
DNF at 38%. Nothing happens except damp metaphors and people staring at a river that won't even make a noise. If I wanted to read tape transcriptions and a love letter to a broken bell, I'd visit a museum brochure. Greybridge is just gray—give me plot, not puddles.
Brown's prose rustles like reeds. The opening—Mara inheriting a brass key and a shoebox of cassettes—sets a tone of quiet, aching curiosity. Elias Noor arrives with his battered field recorder and immediately the book starts listening, not just looking.
The drought scenes are stunning. When the Quietus lowers and the town fishes up bicycle frames and stones chiseled with names from 1987, it feels like a choir breathing in. The cracked bell of St. Bartholomew's, swaddled in felt, is such a haunting image.
The final pages where Mara decides whether to ring the bell had me holding my breath. Brown writes the sound of a community remembering itself, and somehow you can hear it. Every hush has a frequency indeed.
