The Silver Chain

Jion Sheibani

Hot Key Books 341pp (hb) £12.99

This emotive Young Adult verse novel explores the power of music to heal, transform and build resilience. Told through free-flowing poetry, the story charts the struggles of 16-year-old Azadeh, a talented violinist with a music scholarship to an elite private school. Alongside the usual teenage travails of heartache and friendship groups, Azadeh must also navigate her mother’s severe mental health problems and the distance she feels from her Iranian heritage: ‘Farsi is a song I know so well in my head / but cannot sing’. Throughout these various struggles it is the violin that proves Azadeh’s safety net, the one thing that offers a ‘tiny light… in all this darkness’.

Sheibani writes with confidence and integrity, and her descriptions of classical music ring with knowledge and experience. While mostly written in free verse, the book draws imaginatively on other poetic forms – from acrostics to shape poems – and also includes an especially beautiful ghazal, originally an Arabic form that uses hypnotic repetition to explore themes of loss and love. This is a sensitive and engaging book that offers a moving celebration of music’s capacity to bring solace in times of darkness. Kate Wakeling ★★★★