Quiet Is A Lie

Some things are quiet only until you learn how to hear them.A childhood among fruit trees in Zambia. A move to Botswana. A political killing remembered through fragments. Boarding school, Britain, America, marriage, grief, courtrooms, algorithms, history-and a question that refuses to go away:How do you know?In Quiet Is a Lie, Musiata Richard Akafekwa moves through memory, family history and public record, following the patterns that connect colonial maps to modern institutions, racial categories to belonging, private betrayal to public systems, and the old machinery of power to the new machinery learning everything it can about us.Part literary fiction, part autofiction, part investigation, the novel refuses easy villains and cleaner explanations. Memory can be wrong. Institutions can be useful and dangerous at the same time. Good people can do terrible things. Official records can tell the truth and still leave something out.And somewhere beneath all of it is the signal.Darkly funny, intimate and restless, Quiet Is a Lie is a novel about identity, inheritance, power, technology and the stories we are taught to accept before we realize we have been taught anything at all.The past is not past.The present is not neutral.And the future is already learning from you.