My enormous thanks to Helen Richardson for inviting me to participate in the blog tour for Anne Worthington’s The Unheard. I’m thrilled to be able to share my review today.

The Unheard by Anne Worthington was published by Confingo Publishing on 11 July as a Paperback Original at £7.50.  It is available now from the Confingo Publishing website.

The Unheard

The Unheard is the powerful and intensely moving debut novel by acclaimed documentary photographer Anne Worthington. It is a novel about memory, and what happens to the experiences that are too much for us, but we are unable to leave behind.

We meet Tom Pullan in 1999 when he has dementia. He lives with his wife, May. The visitors who come to the house aren’t the people he remembers. He would like to see the people that remain in his memory. The visitors say they have come to help but they only seem to cause trouble.

Fifteen years earlier, in 1984, Tom is working in an office amid sweeping redundancies across the country. His office is told there are going to be cuts and Tom is convinced he will be one of those who will lose their job. And he is sure that at the root of this, the person who’s orchestrating these changes is the prime minister. He watches her every day talking about cuts, all the while wielding an axe in her hands.

In 1931, Tom’s family walked away from their house leaving everything behind. They not only lost a home, but his brother has gone, and no one says a word. Now, he must do what he can to keep his father happy, and his father is never happy. Tom goes looking for his brother every day. He waits for his brother to come home because people don’t just disappear. Sometimes, waiting is all you can do when you can’t make sense of the world.

My Review of The Unheard

Tom has dementia.

If you’re looking for a light-hearted read that you’ll forget minutes after you’ve read it, don’t read The Unheard because this is a book that grasps your heart from the first page and keeps it in a stranglehold to the final syllable in a desperately sad, beautifully written, and scarily accurate narrative that affects the reader profoundly. The Unheard is an exceptional book.

Anne Worthington’s writing is so astute, so perceptive and so wise that I was completely mesmerised. I read The Unheard in one sitting then immediately read it again because I found it both brutal and sensitive – an accurate portrait of the human condition and such a clear insight into how we are the product of our past lives, that I felt a single read simply didn’t do it justice. 

Tom, May and Maggie leap from the page with huge emotional connection for the reader because Anne Worthington places us right inside their minds, sharing their innermost thoughts, emotions and experiences with razor sharp accuracy so it is as if their lives become readers’ lives. This makes The Unheard an uncomfortable, emotional, but totally compelling narrative that I found superb.

I thought the structure of the book was absolutely perfect. Regressing in time over three eras it uncovers layers to Tom especially that create an understanding of him that feels almost too much to bear at times. With social, domestic and political strata too, The Unheard is a kind of love song to the ordinary person, the oppressed and to those who have lost sight of themselves – to the unheard.

I thought The Unheard was astonishingly good. It’s a book that deserves to be lauded from the rooftops. Literary, exquisitely crafted and imbued with a desire to give the unheard a voice, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s quite wonderful.

About Anne Worthington

Anne Worthington is a documentary photographer and writer. She grew up in Blackpool in the Northwest of England before moving to Manchester.

Living in the inner-city area of Hulme during the time when Manchester was at the centre of the UK music scene, she became part of the mix of artists, ex-students and squatters that made the partly abandoned blocks of flats their own. It was in Hulme where the underground music and art was being made. She became part of the Dogs of Heaven collective that produced large-scale art performances.

It was during this time that she first picked up a camera and took photographs of the iconic estate before it was demolished, marking the end of an era of squat culture. Anne went on to become a documentary photographer and over the next twenty years, produced a body of work that highlighted the conditions of housing, and the effects of social and economic change that had begun during the 1980s.

Anne Worthington was awarded an MA Creative Writing with Distinction in 2018. She was a finalist for Iceland Writers Retreat, 2015, and shortlisted for Fish Flash Fiction Prize, 2018.

The Unheard won the Michael Schmidt Prize in 2018. 

For further information, find Anne on Instagram and follow her on Twitter @aworthington111.

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