The silence is deafening.
After a tragic, life-altering accident, 17-year-old Alma isn’t sure she can cope with her new, cruel reality. After the loss of her parents, she suffers post-traumatic shock, which leads her to attempt to take her own life. Her attempt is unsuccessful, and she is immediately checked in to a clinic specialized in treating teenagers with psychiatric pathologies. A rather impressive building with pleasant facilities welcomes the young woman. The staff is committed to making sure that Alma feels comfortable and at home and she, although skeptical at first, begins to open up to her peers and her doctor.
She befriends Luna, who is addicted to any and every drug; Mario, who suffers from schizophrenia and swears he is being spied on; Ferran, who is obsessed with sex; Gabriela who can’t stop eating; and Candela, who is in a permanent state of severe anxiety. Alma feels that she is now a part of this group.
She also meets two deaf children on the second floor, who hide from everyone to protect a home they have made their own ever since they were shunned and abandoned for being different.
Alma will soon discover that the building was a former orphanage for deaf children, where Luisito and Fernandito (the two children from the second floor with whom she becomes close and that she later realizes she is the only person who can see them) had died there many years before.
The children will reveal many of the dark secrets of the orphanage and those who once lived there. Little by little, the story of the building and its former occupants will intertwine with Alma’s reality. This causes her to uncover its dark past that had been hidden for many years within its walls and within her own mind.
RELEVANT DATA: One of 2020’s best-selling authors, Monica Rouanet is best known for the construction and complexity of the characters in her novels. Her latest novel I Can’t Hear the Children Play (No oigo a los niños jugar) is inspired by this iconic building where paranormal events have been documented. In addition, the author has drawn from her experience of more than 20 years working in integration projects with people at risk of social exclusion.
In this story we will meet a group of young people with addictions, obsessions, and emotional dependencies that they do not know how to manage, as well as children abandoned because of a disability. Thus, I Can’t Hear the Children Play (No oigo a los niños jugar) shows us a cruel reality that is often silenced and ignored, interwoven in a chilling plot of mystery and terror in the purest style of The Orphanage and The Others.
What the critics have said:
“A novel that delves, with sensitivity and intrigue, into social exclusion and the pain of being different, without giving up an absorbing mystery plot. The pages practically turn themselves.” Elia Barceló
“There are doors that shouldn’t be opened. Silences that warn us. But we seldom follow those rules.” Víctor del Árbol
“Mónica Rouanet has the extraordinary quality of describing the worst of human beings perfectly.” Juan Diego Guerrero, Onda Cero
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Movie.
LANGUAGES AVAILABLE: Spanish.
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