A Granite Silence

A Granite Silence by Nina Allan (Riverrun, 2025)


In 1934, eight-year-old Helen Priestly sets out from her home in Aberdeen, Scotland, and is never seen alive again. Nearly a century later, Nina Allan walks along Urquhart Road, where Helen lived with her parents, and decides to write about her. What follows is a novel that plays with the notion of a novel; a true crime story that questions which crimes are “true”; a court drama that scrambles ideas of victim and perpetrator; and a speculative fiction narrative that is interested in when and how we speculate—and in what directions we reach. “Even as I try to restrict myself to the facts,” writes Allan, “I come to realize I will never stop being a writer compelled to imagine, and what if the spaces of my mind offer shelter to witches as well as detectives?” What if, indeed.

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