In London, in 2046, a fifteen-year prison sentence takes three minutes and forty seconds.
Daniel Hargreaves walks out of the Ministry of Justice on a Tuesday in October. Inside himself, he has served every day of the fifteen years. Outside, the streets are the streets he left. He is expected, now, to become a person again.
Mara Ellison has been the Ministry's senior clinical oversight officer for nine years. She has watched the Experiential Sentencing programme grow from an ethical experiment into a national success. She has begun to see, in the small revisions the Ministry now makes to its own language, something the language was designed to conceal.
Hannah Vale is a journalist at the Chronicle. She has noticed a phrase recurring in the incident logs of released offenders. Eerily calm. She has begun to wonder what it means. She is about to be told.
Three people, moving in parallel through the winter of 2046, brought into contact by a system that has been quietly becoming something other than what it was built for.
Careful, restrained, and quietly furious, The Quiet Sentence is a novel about what a country agrees not to see.