A Grammar of Rain
Nadia Okonjo2025
01Literary fiction
The Silent City
Some stories are found. Others find you.
Written by Ilya Marren
For eleven years the city of Vares has not made a sound. No sirens, no bells, no argument carried up from a courtyard. The residents go on living, and they go on refusing to explain.
A sound archivist arrives to record what is left, and finds that silence is not an absence but a decision — one the city renews every morning. What she assembles is less a record than a confession.
- Published
- 17 March 2026
- Extent
- 328 pages
- Format
- Paperback, sewn
- ISBN
- 978-1-9998-0141-2
Contents
- iAn inventory of quiet things
- iiThe last recorded argument
- iiiTwelve doors, none of them locked
- ivWhat the river kept
- vVares, in the ordinary sense
Notices
Marren writes cities the way other novelists write difficult relatives — with exhausted, unbreakable love.
The Paper Review
A novel that earns its quiet. Not a syllable is wasted.
Fold Quarterly
About Ilya Marren
Ilya Marren worked for nine years as a sound engineer for public radio before publishing anything, and it shows: his novels are built out of what people do instead of talking.
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Some stories are found. Others find you.