Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds – bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all.

The Quiet Ear tells the story of Raymond’s upbringing at the intersection of race and disability. Growing up in East London to an English mother and Jamaican father, educated in both mainstream and deaf schooling systems, Raymond explores the shame of miscommunication and the joy of finding community, and shines a light on the decline of deaf education in Britain.

Throughout, Raymond sets his story alongside those of other D/deaf cultural figures, from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers – the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity he did not have growing up.

The Quiet Ear is a ground-breaking and much-needed examination of deafness. A memoir, a cultural history, a call to action.

Read this book ― Lemn Sissay

A tender triumph ― Emma Warren

A resounding tribute to deaf artistry, to deaf identity, and to the ways that sound and language ― and the boundless universe in between ― shape a life. Antrobus writes with lyric clarity and the radiant music of a poet, interrogating the complex histories of British and Jamaican selfhood, the legacy of rootlessness across the diaspora, and what to do with the inheritances we are given. This is a litany to beauty beyond what is spoken. This book is an essential education. ― Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon 

A marvel. ― Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic

The Quiet Ear is expansive, generous, and massively tender ― a beautiful exploration of an interior life grappling with several magnitudes of loss, and what can be found within them. ―  Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year 

Beautifully complicates and expands our understanding of what deafness is . . . The Quiet Ear has given me new ways to think about the vibration of sound, the movement of language, and the complicated contours of shame. It is a book that changed how I will move through the world. ― Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

Lyrical, moving and powerful. ― Alice Wong, author of Year of the Tiger 

This expansive memoir chronicles Antrobus’ vexed journey across and between the multitudes he contains: [and] the fraught but ultimately joyful experience of living between hearing and deafness. ― Andrew Leland, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Country of the Blind

Antrobus’s incredible capacity for documenting the interior is on full show here, traversing not just his griefs and losses but his hopes and joys, too. This book left me transformed. ― Caleb Azumah Nelson, author of Open Water 

A journey through language, history and family, The Quiet Ear is a moving and expansive book about the long journey of finding a voice, and the joy and power of using it. ― Séan Hewitt, author of Open, Heaven 

In The Quiet Ear, Raymond Antrobus lifts up a defiant mirror to the mainstream world that has long ignored and shamed the d/Deaf communities and masterfully crafts a world we all deserve: one free of shame, one where deaf people are uplifted, empowered, no longer at the margins of society, but in the centre, full of joy and thriving. ― Javier Zamora, author of Solito

The Quiet Ear isn’t simply about hearing; it’s about perception, identity, and the politics of language. Antrobus doesn’t just open our ears ― he opens our understanding. ― Dame Evelyn Glennie, Grammy Award-winning musician

His poetic sensibility infuses his moving memoir about living between the worlds of the hearing and the deaf, and brings colour to his observations about a life spent noticing and attempting to fill in the gaps.― The Washington Post

Poignant, illuminating, and perceptive . . . Rewriting myths of deafness, Antrobus depicts the diversity of sound worlds, reframing the loss of hearing as a gain. ― Booklist