title: Degrees of Silence
author: Forrester, Kate
description: To the outside world it looks like Tom has it all – good looks, fantastic job, wonderful home and lovely daughter. But it is all an expensive façade; a pretence that is slowly crumbling. Since his divorce he has been raising his daughter, Lottie, alone. The once bright, intelligent girl is on a path to self-destruction: in trouble at school, hurt and angry over the break-up of her parent’s marriage, she is lashing out at the only target available – Tom. Sabrina Henderson is a popular and successful thirty year old, secondary school teacher whose entire world changes when she develops encephalitis. She wakes from a month long coma to discover that the illness has left her profoundly and irreversibly deaf. Left alone by a fiancé, who can’t cope with her disability, and unable to work when she is cast aside by her employers, Sabrina retreats to a small Cornish village. She is struggling to come to terms with her silent world - hiding away in her cottage, imprisoned by her deafness. When Lottie is expelled from the private school she attends in London, Tom takes the decision to leave his affluent life in the capital and move to Cornwall. It is here that their paths cross with Sabrina’s and all their lives change forever