the loudest sound and nothing

THE LOUDEST SOUND AND NOTHING - Clare Wigfall - published in the UK September 6th, 2007, Faber & Faber
A magnificently assured, dark-hearted and breathtakingly skilled collection of short stories from writer Clare Wigfall

I'm a writer living in Prague, Czech Republic. I was born in Greenwich, London during the summer of 1976, and grew up in Berkeley, California before my parents moved us back to the UK. When I was twenty-one, an editor from Faber visited my university. On the train back to London he read a short story I'd written. The next day he called up wanting to read more. I'd written only two other stories so I sent him those. A week later Faber asked me to write them a book. It could be on any subject, could take any form, and I could take as long as I needed to write it. I was too young to know how unusual this offer was. I didn't think I'd lived enough yet to write anything anyone would want to read, so I moved to Prague and took my time. This is the book I wrote for Faber. They believe it will be enjoyed by fans of early Ian McEwan . There have also been comparisons to David Mitchell , Raymond Carver , Penelope Fitzgerald , Donna Tartt , and Angela Carter . It came out this September. Please read it. Please enjoy it.
About the book:
One long hot summer, Eveline drowns a wasp nest, and while digging amongst the tiny corpses makes a sinister discovery. A university professor arrives unannounced at the door of an Arizona fortune-teller, little knowing how this woman will alter his life. A sudden spate of disappearing new-borns terrifies a young mother. As the Prussian army encroaches, the besieged city of Paris asks an enormous sacrifice of its city zookeeper. And over a Coca-Cola in an Andalusian village bar, a woman hears from a stranger the worst thing a mother can do.
The characters in Clare Wigfall’s stories are all searching for something missing, something absent. As they go about their seemingly ordinary lives, the dark undercurrent of life, with all its complications and imperfections, is gradually revealed. Extraordinarily compelling, incredibly skilled and pitch perfect in tone, these stories mark Clare Wigfall as a debut writer of enormous talent.