Book Description

Amidst the growing prosperity of India, there is an entire generation of parentless children growing up. They are everywhere. They fill the streets, the railway stations, the shanty villages. Some scrounge through trash for newspapers, rags or anything they can sell at traffic intersections. Others, often as young as two or three years old, beg. Many are homeless, overflowing orphanages and other institutional homes to live on the streets where they are extremely vulnerable to being trafficked into child labor if they're lucky, brothels if they're not. They are invisible children; their plight goes virtually unnoticed, their voices silenced. Shelley Seale's narrative non-fiction book follows the lives of just such children as those brought to life in the movie Slumdog Millionaire. The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India depicts Seale's journey into orphanages and through the streets and slums of India where millions of innocent children live without families. During her three years of writing The Weight of Silence, Seale has befriended and told the stories of many such children - and has born witness to their struggles first hand. Foreword by Joan Collins, with endorsements by Geralyn Dreyfous (Executive Producer of Born Into Brothels), Dominique Lapierre (Author of City of Joy), Save The Children, Human Rights Watch and more. The Weight of Silence: Invisible Children of India is a non-fiction narrative that gives a strong and hopeful voice to its most vulnerable citizens. "The stories told in this book do not belong to me. They were given to me as a gift, often because I was the only person who had ever asked." Shelley Seale