• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2016 April #2
  Simon is on a mission to find a person in London, and the only information he has is a song. Simon's goal makes more sense when one understands that the England of The Chimes is one controlled by music and memory loss. Every day, the enigmatic elite ruling class known as the Order plays a particular kind of music to wipe society's memory. To remember certain aspects of their past and daily life, citizens rely on their muscle memory and items they carry with them. Those that can't make it from the day-to-day or lose their memory items become zombie-like creatures called the memorylost. Without the ability to retain any sort of history, collective memory, or even written language, the culture is one that revolves around the preservation of the few memories possible and music. Sound seems to envelope the characters throughout the text, which is conveyed by wonderfully lyrical language and the consistent references to everything as beats or rhythm. This imaginative novel from poet Smaill was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

Anna Smaill is a classically trained violinist and published poet. Born in Auckland in 1979, she holds an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters (Wellington), an MA in English Literature from the University of Auckland and a PhD in contemporary American poetry from University College London. She is the author of one book of poetry, The Violinist in Spring, and her poems have been published and anthologized in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. She has lived and worked in both Tokyo and London, and now lives in New Zealand with her husband, novelist Carl Shuker, and their daughter.