“Even as I try to restrict myself to the facts, I come to realise I will never stop being a writer compelled to imagine, and what if the spaces of my mind offer shelter to witches as well as detectives? What if the witches keep confounding the investigation with their sordid rituals, their endless harping on how things used to be back in their day, their insatiable hoarding of mementoes, their raucous laughter?

Writing is like drawing an outline or unravelling wool: the more you do it, the more there is, the further you can go, and I am the kind of writer who makes up stories from the contents of a handbag, who invents identities for a group of strangers standing in a bus queue, landing them with complicated back stories and webs of mad relatives. I fixate on small details – the colours and textures of cherished garments, the stuff in people’s kitchens – because these are the details that nail reality into place.”

Nina Allan, as long-time readers and indeed anyone who has spoken to me about books will know, is one of my all-time favourite authors. She is one of the modern masters of speculative fiction, and each new novel or story she writes sees her pushing her art in surprising and challenging directions. A Granite Silence (2025), her new novel, once again shows us a writer unwilling to rest on her impressive laurels, but determined to use her writing to interrogate the form and the function of fiction. A Granite Silence differs from Allan’s previous novels in that it is, in part at least, true crime. True crime is a genre I don’t actually know very much about, so I was wondering if I would be able to bring the usual depth that I bring to reviewing Allan’s more speculative or horror work. But I shouldn’t have worried. The novel – and strange as this may sound, it is still very much a novel – is Allan’s own particular take on the genre of true crime. This means that not only is she deeply interested and invested in the crime itself and the people whose lives it destroyed, she is using her novelistic techniques to interrogate both true crime as a genre, and the novel as a form. What does it mean to tell the story of people who really lived and suffered? How do we square that with our interest in the tragedy that wrecked their lives? And if the novel’s strengths as a form, its attention to detail, its ability to capture the interior lives of its characters, real or imagined, can be used to talk about something that really happened, what does that tell us about how and why we tell stories? These are the big questions that Allan is grappling with, as much as the motivations behind violence and the pursuit of justice.

A Granite Silence focuses on the real life events in 1934, Aberdeen, when eight-year old Helen Priestly living in the tenements on Urquhart is sent by her mother to buy bread and is never seen alive again. A week later, her body is found in the hallway of the tenement where her family lives, and her neighbour, Jeannie Donald is tried for the murder and found guilty. The historical context of this appalling brutal child murder taking place around the birth of modern forensics in working-class Aberdeen is interesting enough in itself, but Allan goes further than simply recounting the facts. A Granite Silence lets us in to Allan’s research process, showing us a portrait of the author as detective, as she investigates a 90 year old case through newspapers, photographs, police reports, detailed reports of the trial, the sad remnants that accumulate around tragedy. She explores her conflicting feelings as she explores an event that ruined the lives of multiple people. She brings her literary strengths to imagining the interior lives of those involved in the case – Helen herself, Helen’s mother Agnes Priestly, Helen’s killer Jeannie Donald, Jeannie’s family, her husband Alexander and her daughter Wee Jeannie, the forensic doctor who gave evidence at the trial John Glaister. She also explores the lives of several imagined characters, who range from the time of the crime through to the present day, whose lives are shaped by their fascination with Helen’s murder. Thus she is able to explore how this single act of violence against a child, carried out in private, echoes out across time to touch a huge number of people’s lives.

As a writer, Allan has always been interested in the subtle ways in which narrative can interweave fact and fiction. She uses this technique in most of her novels, particularly memorably in The Rift (2017), to create a powerful sense of disorientation. If we accept that one aspect of what a writer is telling us in a story is true, why not another? To read a book, even a completely fantastical story, is in a sense to place trust in the author. Allan is interested in the ways in which this trust can be subverted, and what that means for us as readers. This question becomes particularly vexed when we consider a genre like true crime. By the very nature of the genre, we are dealing with a story about real people and the things that happened to them, told to us by a writer who, in order to do their job has hopefully approached their subject with an open mind and done all the appropriate research, but almost certainly was not there and did not know the people involved. Whose story is this to tell? What is our interest as readers, beyond the prurient interest in the taboos of violence and murder? Whose voices does the author choose to prioritise, and how does this shape how we as readers react to people and events that really existed? 

 If the act of writing a true crime novel trains the author to be the detective, Allan uses these probing questions to turn the reader of A Granite Silence into a detective. Because at the end of the day, these are ways we might interrogate any text, whether fact or fiction. As Allan demonstrates, sometimes fiction is the most powerful and appropriate way to get to the humanity at the heart of a true story. Conversely, any story that recounts events that have actually happened has, to some extent, been fictionalized in its telling by the very act. And while the act of narrativization is a natural part of how we as humans perceive the world around us, it’s always worth being wary of who is telling you this story and why. Particularly in this age of weaponized misinformation, these concerns have never been more urgent. 

Where does that leave readers and writers of speculative fiction? Perhaps all we have is the ability and willingness to approach a text with a mutual trust, but with eyes wide open. Allan’s writing, as always, pays back the reader’s time and attention. Much as the case with her previous novels, A Granite Silence demonstrates Allan’s mastery of complex narrative structure. The timeline of the events – setting the scene, the act of violence, the investigation, the trial – give the book a strong sense of structure, and it’s clear Allan could write a straightforward crime thriller if she wanted to. But A Granite Silence is much bolder and stranger than that. Through a series of interweaving narratives, Allan follows the case through the lives of the people involved but also of those who become fascinated by the case down the years. It is the chance encounters, the telling interactions between strangers, the ways in which people unconsciously reveal their stories to us, that often take centre stage. 

A Granite Silence also finds space to interpolate various different narrative approaches. Over the course of the book, Allan deploys modes as varied as fairy tales, weird fiction, speculative fiction and ghost stories. These sections may not shed more clarity on the events as they happened, but they do allow Allan to delve into what is it about Helen Priestly’s case that has attracted so much interest over the years. After all, it is the hidden drives, emotions and compulsions that are the beating heart of any true crime story – what happened unseen that so pushed these people’s lives out of the mundane and into tragedy? Allan notes that a lot of the press reaction to the case was shaped by the fact that Jeannie Donald was a woman. There is an inherent misogyny in how the case was reported, partially because a patriarchal society sees women as naturally caring and maternal, making Jeannie’s act of horrific violence against a child difficult to frame. Jeannie becomes the wicked witch of folk tale, the evil stepmother from fairy tales, somehow both more than human and less than a person, and as the process develops, increasingly unlikely to receive an impartial verdict from any jury. Allan deftly explores how this human woman is, through the power of the stories told about her, turned into a fairy tale monster. The tools to best do this fall outside the realms of memetic fiction, and so we get post-modern fairy tales reimagining Jeannie’s past, and retellings of Robert Burns’ Tam O’Shanter in a 1930s London idiom, where parallels are found between Tam’s drunken flight home chased by witches and Alexander Donald’s obliviousness to his wife’s crime. 

True crime reveals not only the process of the detective trying to uncover the truth, but also the rigorous forensic science that provides both us the readers and the jury in the trial with the evidence that makes the prosecutor’s case against the criminal. Allan makes forensic doctor John Glaister a key part of the text. In what is perhaps my favourite section of the book, ‘The Stormy Petrel’, we get a deeply intense fictionalized account of Glaister’s life as a young man many year prior to the Jeannie Donald trial, in which speculative fiction allows Allan to confront Glaister with something completely outside his understanding. If we live in a world where men of science find their understanding of the world challenged, how do we rate the evidence gleaned from that science in a matter as weighty as determining the guilt or otherwise of a murder? It’s an incredible sequence that could have been a novella on its own, but within the context of the rest of the book it forms a powerful part of how Allan interrogates our ways of knowing.

Of course, the real-life tragedy of any true crime is the lives that have been brutally shortened, and their loved ones whose lives have been forever altered. Allan brings the book to a powerful and moving end with ‘Coconut: A Ghost Story’, in which she imagines how the life of Helen Priestly might have looked had she been allowed to grow up. It’s a powerful and disconcerting piece of writing, in which Helen comes to suspect that she is the ghost haunting her own story. And in a way she is the spectre haunting the entire book – Helen’s life ended in an act of violence without which we would not have the story, yet because she is killed as a child we know Helen as negative space, the terrible gaping hole left in the lives of her friends and family. There is an extent to which the chronicler of events by nature is left outside looking in, but this is the one fitting gift that Allan is able to give to Helen – not to erase her violent death, which can never be done, but by granting her the interiority granted to every human being. 

So at the end of the day, what kind of book is A Granite Silence? Fittingly, I’m left with more questions than answers. It’s an exploration of hidden human desires and motivations, and it’s a vivid dissection of the social attitudes that shaped 1930s Aberdeen and so shaped the people whose lives are caught up in this story. It’s a powerful dissection of the concept of truth, and how our memories, our preconceptions, our perspectives will always muddy these waters. And it’s a brilliantly written and haunting speculative fiction novel, one of the best you’re likely to read this year. But perhaps after all I’ve said, you’d be wise not to take my word for it.

A Granite Silence is available now, you can order your copy HERE