The Silence of the Lambs

The Silence of the Lambs is a thriller by the American writer Thomas Harris, published in 1988 and the second of his novels about Dr Hannibal Lecter.

Clarice Starling is young, from West Virginia, and aware that she is being used as bait: the offer of help she brings to the asylum is a pretext for putting a woman in front of a prisoner who has not spoken to an investigator in years. What Lecter asks for in return is not information but pieces of her own past, which he collects the way case files accumulate around her. Harris alternates the interviews with the search for a murderer who keeps women in a pit in his cellar and with the small, procedural work of reading a case: the motel registers, the clothes, the moths, the way a body is left. It is the best known book of the Lecter series and has sold more than ten million copies, and it won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel in 1988 and the Anthony Award in 1989 as well as a nomination for the World Fantasy Award. Jonathan Demme's film version followed in 1991, won all five of the major Academy Awards, and remains the only horror film to have taken Best Picture.