The author certainly offers plenty of clues.

It does not take long to figure out the main underlying situation here. But when they make their way back to their hotel, on the outskirts of Saint-Bernard-en-Haut near the French-Spanish border, everyone is gone, from the slopes, from the hotel, from the town. Only death accepted silence and there was silence here.In The Silent World, Graham Joyce’s eighteenth book and 2011 World Fantasy Award and British Fantasy Award nominee, a young couple, Zoe and Jake, on a skiing holiday in the Pyrenees, are caught in an avalanche. Perhaps not even in the ancient world, either: there was wind in the desert insects in the depths of the forest wave activity in the middle of the ocean. It wasn’t possible in the modern world, to listen to the sound of true silence. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic.True silence. Though Joyce envisions an intriguing realm nestled against our own, what’s most compelling are his characters’ chaotic emotions and reconnections as they struggle to cope with what they can’t understand. As Tara accepts counseling with an eccentric psychiatrist and a stranger lurks about, Peter and Richie begin to wonder if her fantastical story may actually hold some truth.

The two men haltingly take up their friendship where it left off, and Richie realizes that he still loves Tara. Peter breaks a 10-year silence with his former best friend, Richie Franklin, who as Tara’s boyfriend at the time of her disappearance was the main suspect, to let him know that Tara’s back.

When 35-year-old Tara Martin shows up on her parents’ doorstep two decades after she disappeared, unkempt and looking oddly as if she’s barely aged, her older brother, Peter, a farrier married with four kids, can’t hide his hurt, angry feelings-but they grow even stronger when Tara offers a preposterous story about riding away with a man on a white horse as an explanation for her disappearance. Joyce (The Silent Land) blends reality with fantasy in this modern-day fable.

The silent land by graham joyce aqa