Wood casts his net wide: a brilliant dissection of Beckett's prose comedy is followed by an investigation of three Spanish-American writers (Cortazar, Cabrera Infante, Arenas) and by an absorbing sequence of essays on Kundera, Calvino and Garcia Marquez. Chapters on Toni Morrison and on Angela Carter lead us to chapters on Kazuo Ishiguro and Jeanette Winterson.

Here is a book bristling with connections -- between the big themes of modernism and the fractured voices of a later culture; between the voluble public role of the novelist and the obsession of so many writers with books conceived, in Marcel Proust's words, as 'the work of solitude and the children of silence.' Wood probes literature high and low with equal enthusiasm, and indeed helps readers unlearn the very notion of a fixed canon. Children of Silence shows that a living literature is constantly in dialogue with history, both asking history's questions in a different mode and asking the questions that history cannot ask. In an age when literature itself often seems to be threatened, Wood illustrates many of the forms in which literature continues to define the way we see ourselves.