Deaf Sentence

Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a witty, original and absorbing account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness, aging and mortality, and with the comedy and tragedy of human lives.

When the university merged his Department of English with Linguistics, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the routine of the academic year and has lost his appetite for research. His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them.

The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on his aged father who stubbornly refuses to leave the house he is patently unable to live in with safety.

But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment, leading Desmond into mistakes, misunderstandings and follies. It might be comic for others, but for the deaf person himself, it is no joke.

It is his deafness which inadvertently involves Desmond with a seemingly personable young American female graduate student whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilize his life completely.

"Lodge's new novel, like his earlier work, has its finger on the zeitgeist… This is a brave novel, which puts a brave face on everything we'd rather not know about aging, without ducking the atrocity of it all." — The London Review of Books