Puccini's Ghosts
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
For one woman, no matter what has happened through the decades, the music will always linger
Burnhead is an inconspicuous town on the Scottish coast, but for Lila Du Cann, it is the setting for an opera that will change her life forever. When Lila returns to Burnhead to bury her father, she thinks back to 1960, when she fell in love for the first time.
Her parents are in a failing marriage. Lila's mother, Fleur, splits time between two hobbies: arguing with her husband about life and money and retreating to her music room to listen to Puccini's Turandot. Lila's family, however, is thrown a lifeline when her charismatic and flamboyant uncle arrives from London with a hare-brained idea: an amateur staging of Turandot. With Fleur in the title role and Lila as the slave girl Liu, the production's most intriguing casting is George's handsome young student Joe Foscari as the tenor lead, Prince Calaf. Lila quickly falls for him and hopes that he feels the same about her.
As opening night looms, secrets are exposed, high hopes are torn apart, and Lila's painful coming-of-age brings with it devastating lifelong consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of British author Joss's somber fifth novel of psychological suspense, opera singer Lila du Cann (n e Eliza Duncan) returns to her childhood home on the Scottish coast to bury her estranged father. As she starts clearing out the family house, a chance visit to the attic awakens memories of the summer she was 15. Flashback to 1960. Lila's charming uncle George, a music teacher, arrives from London and her warring parents agree willy-nilly to finance an amateur staging of Puccini's opera "Turandot". Uncle George, the producer, hires an attractive tenor, Joe Foscari, for the male lead of Calaf. Soon Lila is smitten, but does Joe have designs on the adolescent girl or do his affections lie elsewhere? Despite a cast of expertly drawn characters, each unhappy in his or her own way, the plot is slow to develop. Still, Joss, whose "Half Broken Things" (2005) won the CWA Silver Dagger Award, shows real promise that she may one day join the ranks of Ruth Rendell and P.D. James. "" .
