Soundtrack of Silence

As a child, Matt Hay didn’t know his hearing wasn’t the way everyone else processed sound - and like a lot of kids who do workarounds to fit in, even the school nurse didn’t catch his condition at the annual hearing and vision checks. But as a prospective college student who couldn’t pass the entrance requirements for West Point, Hay’s condition, generated by a tumour, was unavoidable: his hearing was going, and fast.Soundtrack of Silence was his determined compensation for his condition: a typical Midwestern kid growing up in the 1980s, whose life events were pegged to pop music, Hay planned to commit his favourite songs to memory, a mental playbook not only of the bands he loved, but a way to tap his most resonant memories. And the track he needed to cement most clearly? The one he and his new girlfriend Nora - the love of his life - listened to in the car on their first date.Made vivid with references to instantly recognisable songs - from The Eagles to Elton John, Bob Marley to Bing Crosby, U2 to Peter Frampton - Soundtrack of Silence asks readers to run the soundtrack of their own lives through their minds. And, like much of the music it invokes, it’s in the end a happy story: Hay does marry the girl of his dreams, complex and cutting-edge surgeries allow him via implant and linked external devices to partially hear, and he’s able to share lullaby time with his and Nora’s children.