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Abbie Greaves Books In Order

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Publication Order of Standalone Novels

The Silent Treatment (2020)Description / Buy at Amazon
Anywhere for You / The Ends of the Earth (2021)Description / Buy at Amazon

Abbie Greaves is a British author best known for “The Silent Treatment” the debut novel she published in 2020. She went to Cambridge University and the got a job with a literary agency, where he worked for several years. She was inspired to pen Silent Treatment after she read a magazine article about a child in Japan that never saw his parents talk to each other. The novel that was published in 2020 is a story of love, loss, and lies as it explores themes of fatherhood, motherhood, and how love ties everything together. She published the follow-up novel “The Ends of the Earth” in 2021. The rights for the novel were acquired by Emily Griffin of Deputy Publisher who now has the rights for the novel in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. The rights for the novel in the United States were acquired by William Morrow at auction. Following its massive success in the UK, Europe, and the US, the rights have been sold for five figures in Serbia, Lithuania, Portugal, Germany, and Italy.

Every year since she was old enough to ask her father what he wanted for Father’s Day or Christmas she had heard only one answer “A quiet life.” However, it would take more than two decades to understand how valuable a quiet life was. For as long as she asked that question of her father, she lived in fear of silence. As a child, she believed that silence was a synonym for boredom. As such she never looked forward to the school holidays most of which she had to spend with only her thoughts. As a teenager, the fear of silence grew even worse as she tried to avoid it as much as she could do. For the most part, most of her popular friends and acquaintances were surrounded by noise and loved to hear themselves talk and scream as they laughed whenever they were together. Most kids that were quiet and reserved were often treated with contempt or viewed with suspicion.

After graduating from college, silence became a thing of the past. She moved to London, a city full of tourists and traffic where she got a job at a literary agency. Her place of work was full of ringing telephones and right from home, she could not find silence as she had to snooze her alarm every day of the week before waking up. She would set her radio as she was dressing and then switch to a podcast as she drove to work. At her place of work, her day was full of emails and shouted instructions across the open-plan office. Drinks with friends were usually had while she had to respond to a flurry of texts while apologizing profusely. She structured her life after college in defiance of silence. During this time, she became single and started looking for someone extroverted so that she would avoid the awkward silences. If someone could have those qualities then she thought it would be really great. Nonetheless, she had been ghosted several times and thought that someone could easily have adopted silence as a way of cutting communication. As such she wanted a man that could turn up and be a great talker.

It was at this time that Abbie Greaves started writing “The Silent Treatment” a novel that tells the story of Maggie and Frank a couple that has been married for four decades but over the past half year have hardly spoken to each other. Since she had a hectic time at work, the times that she set aside to write also happened to be some of the most quiet. She began creating her characters between the hours of 5 and 7 am. Much of the inspiration for the novel came from an article she read while riding the Tube when she was commuting back home from work. In the news section of the paper was the story of about 200 words about a Japanese couple that had not spoken a word to each other for two decades. It was a bizarre circumstance that was even stranger as they had an eighteen-year-old son who had never witnessed them exchanging words with each other. Greaves could not stop thinking about the story and there were several aspects of the story that she found interesting. She was particularly interested in the idea of a marriage that starts well but over time silence settles in. She wanted to know what circumstances could make people decide to not speak to each other for years let alone decades. Abbie wanted to know how one could stay in such a marriage when it was not working and it was from there that she developed the idea for her novel.

“The Silent Treatment” by Abbie Greaves is a bittersweet confident debut exploring the enduring love of a married couple that seems clearly unhappy. After a suicide attempt by Maggie, she is put in a coma to save her life. Frank spends hours by his wife’s bedside in a touching gesture of love. A persistent nurse encourages the man to talk to his comatose wife even though he is reluctant and shy. What the medic does not know is that Maggie and Frank have not spoken to each other for the past half a year. Over the course of the story, the themes of marriage, courtship, and a heartbreaking journey of parenthood are told through Maggie’s letters and a bedside confession by Frank. For the first years in marriage, they had struggled to get pregnant but were overjoyed when they got their daughter Eleanor. But the bliss was short-lived as the child turned into a drug addict and was depressed early into her teenage years until she dropped out of high school. Abbie creates a sense of irony as she contrasts the perspectives of both Maggie and Frank. Frank and Maggie adore each other but rather than finding strength in sharing struggles and their heartache they retreat into silence.

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