After the Fire, A Still Small Voice

by Evie Wyld

I have to confess, I've had a love affair with this book. A sweet, sun-drenched, heart-felt love affair. And I'm smitten. Evie Wyld's debut novel slips across hard-edged themes of masculine expression, war, paternal relationships and grief with such beauty and ease that it feels like she is already an old hand. Intensely sensory images lace the narrative: superbly sugary descriptions of cake baking are smelt and tasted; stale beer and fag ash of the pub scenes linger on the pages; the saltiness and scorching sun of the East Australian beach sear through the text; and the horror and stench of festering flesh turn the stomach in the depictions of tropical warfare.

But perhaps most compelling and vivid are Wyld's leading men- Leon, his father (an immigrant from Eastern Europe who is never named) and Frank. Father, grandfather and son are bound together in a legacy of unspeakable trauma that is not only passed down the generations but also to the women that they love. There is a rawness that is buried deep under layers of bravado but which still pervades, and which threatens to crack and weep at any point.

Still, there is immense beauty in the wonderfully subtle periphery characters, in the contrasting delicacy and harshness of the landscape and in the strong undercurrent of emotion that pulls together and pushes apart the central characters.

Publisher: Vintage

Evie Wyld

Award-winning author Evie Wyld was Booktrust's third online writer in residence.

In 2008 she was chosen as one of Granta's New Voices for 2008. Her debut novel After the Fire, A Still Small Voice was the winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2009, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize regional winners (South East Asia and Pacific Best First Book) 2010, and shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2010. In March 2010 she became Booktrust’s third online writer in residence.

She studied Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and Goldsmiths University London, where she concentrated mainly on short stories. Her stories have been published in various magazines and in Goldfish: An Anthology of Writing from Goldsmiths, the National Maritime Museum anthology Sea Stories and in the 3:AM Magazine anthology, London, New York, Paris.

Evie Wyld has lived in South East London for most of her adult life, with frequent trips to Australia, and her family’s sugar cane farm in New South Wales. Much of her writing begins with the landscapes of her childhood, remembering being alone and making up stories from there.

She works in a small independent bookshop in Peckham called Review, and lives in Stockwell.

Evie Wyld