In A Silent Mother Ariëlla Kornmehl describes people who are prepared to move mountains for love or an ideal but who, because it all proves too difficult or they are too weak, resort to other means to achieve their goals; a ruse, a white lie, a half-truth or a great self-deception. And if, in this manner, they achieve what they want; is the truth then a disaster of the deception a blessing? Ariëlla Kornmehl describes these issues in such a way that any simple yes or no falls too short, is too simplistic, crude or inadequate.

Loenia is called back to her native city of St Petersburg on her thirty-first birthday; it is somewhere that she hasn’t been since her marriage in the Netherlands. Her father is in a bad way. Breaking a longstanding agreement with his spouse he tells Loenia that he has never known for sure whether he really is her father. Maybe she would like to raise the issue with her mother, woman to woman? Loenia is speechless, her mother bewildered. How great must the silence be around and about someone before it becomes unbearable?

‘Kornmehl has written a surprisingly beautiful book without frills, in plain language and still images’ – De Telegraaf ****