Sonata for Miriam
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Rich and satisfying, Sonata for Miriam will stay with the reader long after they have put it down.
A middle-aged man living on Auckland's Waiheke Island recalls vividly the sudden death of his daughter Miriam. Grief silenced Adam at the time, but now he decides to break the silence and explore the secrets of the past. The search becomes a tribute to his daughter, and takes Adam from New Zealand to Poland. There he finds the truth about his past, but now he must live with it. On an island off the rocky coast of Sweden he re-connects with the love of his life.
Sonata for Miriam is a heartbreaking tale of a man's search for his past, about the exposure of secrets that have been hidden for too long, and about the importance of talking about the most vital and the most painful in life. But more than anything it is a novel about love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Olsson (Astrid and Veronika) explores the hard-won wisdom that can come through grief. When classical musician Adam Anker (n Lipski) stumbles upon a WWII exhibit at a museum in New Zealand and sees his birth name attached to an elderly woman's plea for information, he decides to search for his long-buried past as a way to lend clarity to his daughter Miriam's future. But later that day, Miriam is killed in an accident, and Adam spends the next year in mourning before contacting the woman, Clara Fried, and beginning a journey that spans three continents and four decades. Along the way, Adam returns to his native Poland after 20 years in New Zealand, discovers a family secret and, through letters and old friends, begins to know his parents as people. He also finds the strength to patch up his relationship with Miriam's mother, Cecilia, who narrates the final part of the book in second-person. Olsson's dense, magisterial prose pulls the reader in immediately, and Adam's profound sadness is perfectly handled it's palpable, but never saccharine or overbearing as the narrative builds toward its unexpected conclusion.
