Love in the Years of Lunacy
A Novel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From an award-winning Australian novelist comes a wonderfully inspiring story about the ill-fated love affair between a white female jazz saxophonist and a black American GI, set against the backdrop of 1940s Sydney.
From an award-winning novelist comes a wonderfully inspiring story about the ill-fated love affair between a white female jazz saxophonist and a black American GI, set against the backdrop of 1940s Sydney.
Sydney, 1942. Pearl is eighteen, beautiful, and impetuous. She plays saxophone in an all-girl jazz band at the Trocadero and occasionally sits in on underground gigs with her twin brother, Martin, who also plays the sax. One evening, black GI and jazz legend James Washington blows into her life, and love begins to unfold against the blacked-out nights and rumor-filled days of a city in the grip of war.
When James is shipped out to fight in New Guinea, Pearl hatches a breathtaking plan to reunite with him. And then all hell breaks loose. Internationally acclaimed author Mandy Sayer writes with astonishing insight and tenderness in this audaciously original novel—a romance with a haunting jazz soundtrack and a war story like no other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sayer's beguiling tale of ill-fated love, adventure, jazz, and the Pacific theater of WWII is framed by half-Aboriginal Jimmy Willis, "Australia's First Indigenous Crime Writer," accepting the challenge left behind by Pearl Willis, his deceased aunt, to "make her story sing." That story begins in 1942 Sydney, when Pearl, a 17-year-old budding musician, sneaks into the blacks-only Booker T. Washington Club. She is mesmerized by James Washington, a black GI and sax player, and accepts his invitation to dinner. As Sydney harbor comes under attack by the Japanese, they seek shelter in an amusement park, and Pearl, as the bombs fall, loses her virginity on a carriage ride, leaving her "fuelled by some potent substance her body was manufacturing for the first time." Both war and discrimination separate Pearl and James, but her obsession with finding him begins an epic race against time that includes a suicide attempt, an engagement to a controlling doctor, and Pearl assuming her twin brother's identity to fight in New Guinea. While Sayer's (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes) tale does sing with a keen sense of time, place, and poetic atmosphere, readers best bring to it a great suspension of disbelief and a handful of tissues.
