This is an affectionate, insightful story about embracing life’s speed bumps to find new meaning in everyday life.

Life sucks when you are a vacuum cleaner-salesman facing redundancy, and your wife of nearly forty years fills your days and nights with incessant chatter. But when Gloria suddenly and alarmingly stops talking, the silence is more than fifty-nine-year-old Bernard can bear. In desperation, Bernard turns to his ex-daughter-in-law for help. Meg has issues of her own, and her bright and funny daughter Ella sometimes wonders if her mum is trying so hard to keep her safe it stops them both from spreading their wings. Will Meg’s suspicious nature thwart her chance encounter with the kindly but engimatic Hal? And is there still hope for Bernard and Gloria on the other side of silence?

Susan Midalia grew up in the Western Australian wheatbelt and has lived in Perth for most of her adult life. She is the author of three collections of short stories- A History of the Beanbag, An Unknown Sky, and Feet to the Stars. Her collections have been shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Awards and twice for the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She retired from teaching in 2007 to become a full-time writer and freelance editor. Her first book, The Art of Persuasion, was published in 2018.