Deafening: A Novel
by Frances Itani
Category: Fiction

“A gorgeously moving, old-fashioned novel” about a woman’s life, loves, and self-discovery on the eve the Great War (O, The Oprah Magazine). At the age of five, Grania O’Neill the daughter of hardworking Irish hoteliers in small town Ontario, emerges from a bout of scarlet fever profoundly deaf, and suddenly sealed off from the world that was just beginning to open for her. While her guilt-plagued mother cannot accept it, Grania finds beloved allies in both her grandmother and her older sister, Tress. It isn’t until she’s enrolled in the Ontario School for the Deaf in Bellville, that Grania really begins to thrive. In time, it’s also where she falls for Jim Lloyd, a hearing man with whom Grania creates a new emotional vocabulary that encompasses both sound and silence. But just two weeks after their wedding, Jim leaves to serve as a stretcher bearer on the blood-soaked battlefields of Flanders. During this long war of attrition, Jim and Grania’s letters back and forth—both real and imagined—attempt to sustain their young love in a world as brutal as it is hopeful. A “brilliantly lucid and masterfully sustained” ode to language—how it can console, imprison, and liberate—Francis Itani’s award-winning, international bestselling debut novel “has the integrity of an achieved artistic vision, the kind of power that is generally associated with the gracious, crystalline prose of Grace Paley, the flagrantly good, good lines of Robert Lowell and W. H. Auden’s poetry” (Kaye Gibbons, author of A Virtuous Woman).