Much needed light is shed on the isolating world of the deaf through the author’s own personal journey recounting how she gradually lost her hearing leaving her with rage then hard won acceptance only to find she had a condition that could benefit from the most intricate surgery. As a writer and journalist, she deals with the condition in a way natural to her, investigating and explaining, revealing her own story and those of others, a humbling read that brings home the reality of how lack of hearing can lead to exclusion, the sheer exhaustion of trying to live in a hearing world. ~ Sue Baker
In 1997, Bella Bathurst began to go deaf. Within a few months, she had lost half her hearing, and the rest was slipping away. She wasn't just missing punchlines, she was missing most of the conversation - and all of the jokes. For the next twelve years deafness shaped her life, until, in 2009, everything changed again. Sound draws on this extraordinary experience, exploring what it is like to lose your hearing and - as Bella eventually did - to get it back, and what that teaches you about listening and silence, music and noise. She investigates the science behind deafness, hearing loss among musicians, soldiers and factory workers, sign language, and what the deaf know about these subjects that the hearing don't. If sight gives us the world, then hearing - or our ability to listen - gives us each other. But, as this engaging and intelligent examination reveals, our relationship with sound is both personal and far, far more complex than we might expect.
'Bella Bathurst has built a lamp herself: it illuminates the work of a literary hero, a family business, a habit of mind and a Scottish period ... from the summit of this first terrific book she looks to become one of the best biographers of her generation' Andrew O'Hagan,The Times
'This is a grand book doing for lighthouses what Dava Sobel's Longitude did for marine chronometers, and doing it, if comparisons are to be made, with considerably more panache.' -- Nicholas Bagnall, Sunday Telegraph
Author
About Bella Bathurst
Bella Bathurst is the author of The Lighthouse Stevensons, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and of the novel Special. Her journalism has appeared in the Washington Post, the London Sunday Times, and other major periodicals. Born in London, she lives in Scotland.
