Orpheus Lost

by Janette Turner Hospital

In this powerful and passionate new novel, Janette Turner Hospital tackles head-on questions of national security, art, terrorism, and love. Leela is a mathematician who has escaped her Southern hometown to study in Boston. She meets an Australian musician, Mishka, and from the moment she first hears him play his music grips her; they quickly become lovers. Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation center somewhere outside the city. There has been an explosion in the subway; terrorism is suspected. The interrogator―an old childhood friend―now reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture, and despair in search of her lover. Janette Turner Hospital, whose works are "richly imbued with a highly lyrical and luminous quality" ( San Diego Union-Tribune ) again shows her genius, interweaving a literary thriller with a story of passion and the triumph of decency in confusing and dangerous times.

Genres: Fiction, Music, Contemporary, Australia, Thriller, Terrorism, Audiobook

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Born in 1942, Janette Turner Hospital grew up on the steamy sub-tropical coast of Australia in the north-eastern state of Queensland. She began her teaching career in remote Queensland high schools, but since her graduate studies she has taught in universities in Australia, Canada, England, France and the United States.

Her first published short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly (USA) where it won an 'Atlantic First' citation in 1978. Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in l977) won Canada's $50,000 Seal Award in l982. She lived for many years in Canada and in 1986 she was listed as by the Toronto Globe & Mail as one of Canada's 'Ten Best Young Fiction Writers'. Since then she has won a number of prizes for her eight novels and four short story collections and her work has been published in multiple foreign language collections. Three of her short stories appeared in Britain's annual Best Short Stories in English in their year of publication and one of these, 'Unperformed Experiments Have No Results', was selected for The Best of the Best, an anthology of the decade in l995.

The Last Magician, her fifth novel, was listed by Publishers' Weekly as one of the 12 best novels published in 1992 in the USA and was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'. Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for Australia's Miles Franklin Prize Award and for Canada's Trillium Award, and in England it was listed in 'Best Books of the Year' by The Observer, which noted "Oyster is a tour de force… Turner Hospital is one of the best female novelists writing in English." In the USA, Oyster was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'.

Due Preparations for the Plague won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award in 2003, the Davitt Award from Sisters in Crime for "best crime novel of the year by an Australian woman”, and was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award. In 2003, Hospital received the Patrick White Award, as well as a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the University of Queensland.

Orpheus Lost, her most recent novel, was one of five finalists for the $110,000 Australia-Asia Literary prize in 2008.

Orpheus Lost was also on Booklist's Top 30 novels of the year in 2008, along with novels by Booker Prize winner Anne Enright, National Book Award winner Denis Johnson, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, Ian MacEwan, Ha Jin, and Michael Chabon.

The novel also made the list of Best 25 Books of the Year of Library Journal, and Hospital was invited to be a keynote speaker at the annual convention of the American Library Association in Los Angeles in June 2008.

The Italian edition, Orfeo Perduto, has been so well-received in Italy that it will be a featured title at the literary festival on Lake Maggiore in June 2010 where Hospital will be a featured author.

She holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and in 2003 received the Russell Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences, conferred by the university for the most significant faculty contribution (research, publication, teaching and service) in a given year.

Reviews

[MB · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really, really wanted to like this book.

But I did not.

There is only one real prerequisite for me to enjoy a story, which is that I have to like the characters. Even if a novel is absolutely mediocre (or worse yet, boring), I'll still probably like it if I feel ANY sort of connection at all to its characters, leading me to often give books higher ratings than the storytelling probably deserves.

I did not care about either of the leads in this story, which made it hard for me to root for them to win. Actually, because of the supposed Orpheus and Eurydice theme, I was rather hoping they'd both die in the end. They did not. :( They were far too pretentious, miserable, and overall ridiculously unrealistic for me to relate to either of them, so even when we were given more backstory, I just wasn't interested in any of it. (Why read the biography of a person you have literally zero curiosity about?)

The other thing that really bothered me about this story was the author's choice of Underworld. The villainous characters were Middle Eastern terrorists who had been carrying out a series of bombings in Boston. I not only found this lazy on the author's part (because that choice of villain took a lot of imagination), but also that it needlessly perpetuates harmful stereotypes and Islamophobia. That really detracted from what little enjoyment of this book I was actually able to muster. Which, granted, wasn't much, but still.

In summary: unlikeable characters, boring meandering plot, harmful stereotypes...oh, and insta-love! My other least favorite trope.

Looking back, I'm surprised I made it through the whole thing.

Also, this is in no way, shape or form an "Orpheus and Eurydice" retelling. The only way I would have picked up on that angle would be through the constant in-text references to the myth, but to call this book a "retelling" is really a stretch.

Did not enjoy. Would not recommend. Don't know what to do with my copy now.

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

An inversion of the Orpheus myth where our hero gets trapped in the Underworld and his lover Eurydice orchestrates his release.

Mishka, a half Jewish, half Lebanese Australian studying music in Boston, is our Orpheus while his lover Leela, a transplant from the Bible-belt south (from a town appropriately called Promised Land), studying the mathematics of music, is his Eurydice. In his quest to find his missing Lebanese father, Mishka gets involved with a bunch of suicide-bomber terrorists and flies out to Lebanon where he disappears. On his tail, and on Leela’s, is the twisted and tortured Cobb, also formerly from Promised Land, a veteran of the Iraq war, now a contract security consultant; Cobb has secretly admired, pursued, and been scorned by Leela while they were growing up in Promised Land. Now it’s payback time for Cobb as he holds the power to bring Mishka back alive, or not.

The story flips back and forth between Boston, Promised Land, the Daintree rainforest in north-eastern Australia, and the Middle East. While the American and Australian scenes are well developed (probably due to the writer’s first-hand experience of having lived in these countries), I found the Middle Eastern ones sparse, suggesting that Turner Hospital had no real experience of the locale and was writing from sketchy research material. That said, there are great contrasting scenes painted in the US and Australia: the dreamlike sequences when Leela and Miskha first meet and later when they realize that they are implicated in terrorism after a subway bombing in Boston; when Mishka recalls growing up at Chateau Daintree deep in the rainforest, the only child in a quirky multi-generational family of transplanted music –loving Hungarian Jews released from the Holocaust, as unique to the area as the quandong trees that grow only in the Daintree; and when we are taken back to Promised Land to visit Leela’s and Cobb’s respective cantankerous fathers, both dying of cancer and waiting out the other guy.

Strangely enough, I was enjoying the literary nature of the book until the pace quickened after Mishka was kidnapped and the novel veered off into the thriller genre, and, in my opinion, failed at that point. Because what happens in the Middle East is so fragmentary and all the action happens off-stage, I found this section more like a data dump where all the loose ends were tied up in a perfunctory way, as if the book was being suddenly rushed to market. It’s a pity, because the build up to that point was superb.

Shortcomings apart, this book is a good reminder of how terrorism has penetrated the fabric of life and literature in the developed west, be it in the US or Australia, and how it has conditioned our behaviour and expectations. And it also says to me that the literary-thriller genre is still an open field, and that it’s tough to integrate two different genres without readers on both sides of the scale left wanting “a little bit more.”

[Alyssa Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Someone told me once (and I'm sure he was paraphrasing from someone much more qualified) the most interesting stories are entered late, and left early. Orpheus Lost makes great use of this technique, leaving me desperate for origins in the beginning and eager for more at the end.
This novel combines real, gritty characters - all with their own individual personalities and flaws that make them, undeniably, into real people - a compelling story line, and a glimpse into some of the darkest and strangest corners of human nature.

There is an urgency to the scenes written in the present, and an aching nostalgia in the recollections. Told in three perspectives - Leela, Mishka, and Cobb - the story is moved by the characters, by their relationships and interconnectedness, and offers the reader surprising insight. The freedom and clarity that Leela expresses clashes with, and yet compliments, Mishka's careful consideration, his thoughtfulness and silence. All of this pales in the shadow of Cobb, his power, honour, anger, and his constant need to continue.

The narrative is constructed through memory. The action seems to carry on in the background, the main plot made no less captivating by the recollections that seem to be the main attraction. The stories of their pasts pull them together, a trio of yearning that will lead them all in different directions. The story plays out without cliche and without any false service to the reader - the story told is entirely its own, feeling very real and very true. It's picks up speed, bringing the reader to the edge of the precipice over and over, with false starts and false finishes, until a suitable ending is uncovered, hiding in the final pages of an epilogue.

This is the kind of novel, the kind of writing and story telling that takes hold of me, compelling, and holds on until the very last page.

[Ruth Seeley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange to have read this immediately before Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault, but I find my reading often provides this kind of inadvertent synchronicity, as if I were attempting to write undergraduate papers on novels with similar themes. Loss, the devastating effects of war-induced diaspora, and love as redemption are this novel's themes too, but Turner Hospital manages to create characters about whom one gives a damn. I often wonder why she isn't better known and/or taken more seriously as a writer.

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unreal but so real. I could hear the voices and music and feel the harrowing despair. It's the first book I've read of hers but won't be the last.

[Siegrist · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There's a gene for melancholy and I have passed it on". Devorah Bartok, one of the main characters of Janette Turner Hospital's new book "Orpheus Lost" hypothesizes at one particularly hopeless moment in the narrative and, indeed, for those of us with this tendency to melancholy, recent events of world history have been a little difficult to bear. From the hastily constructed, clumsy rhetoric of the War on Terror to the seemingly inevitable exposure of the leaked photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison . Janet Turner Hospital's new novel "Orpheus Lost" takes this melancholy territory as its background and adds a modern rendition of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which lovers are set an impossible task and fail as a result of being human. The lovers in this case are Leela, a mathematician, and Mishka, a musician, both interestingly dealing in abstract representations of the world.

Turner Hospital's canvas is vast and encompasses both political and artistic sense of diaspora. Mishka's grandparents are holocaust survivors who became outsiders in North Queensland, Mishka travels to the states for his music and to the middle east in search of a his father. Although most obviously about recent events in world history the scars of conflicts in Europe and Vietnam linger for the characters of the novel. Despite the novel's broad scope the characters are profoundly lonely. The more dominant the mechanisms are to control the world the more isolated the people within it.

Despite the weight if it's message "Orpheus Lost" is a highly readable book. Turner Hospital's characterization is such that the reader feels an immense sense of care for all of the novel's characters. Even the sadist mercenary Cobb is presented in a sympathetic light and is provided with the opportunity for redemption.

Music is a central motif in the book. "For loss we have music". The reader finishes the book keen to seek out Gluck's musical retelling of the Orpheus myth and left to imagine Mishka's own composition "Sonatina for Parrots and Quandongs".

[Celia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Hospital's writing, and I think even if you didn't enjoy Orpheus Lost, you can't deny the skill of Hospital as an author.

Orpheus Lost is a re-working of the myth of Orpheus - although any subtleties would have been lost on me, given that my knowledge of the myth is Orpheus seeks to retrieve Eurydice from the dead, and looks back at the last minute only to lose her forever. Our Orpheus in Orpheus Lost is Mishka, whom Leela discovers playing his violin in the subway. They become lovers, and we explore each of their backgrounds - Mishka's in the Daintree rainforest, Leela's in the American South with her religious father. I found the Daintree rainforest sections a bit forced in their descriptiveness, but that's probably because of my familiarity with the area.

Mishka occasionally disappears overnight, and after a bombing in the city Leela is approached by the secret service with questions about Mishka's movements. The story moves on from there, and overseas. Leela's role is to bring Mishka home, from the land of the dead he finds himself in, while Mishka struggles to come to terms with the past he came to find. Parts of the story are quite viscerally horrifying, particularly those that evoke Abu Ghraib.

As a whole I really enjoyed the book, although I found some of the sequences, which are written in a dream-like hallucinatry manner, a little too confusing when they were stationed during vital places in the plot.

[Fredsky · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not like this book, and gave up on it after I started peeking at the last pages for a conclusion. I found it soupy and contrived.

[Rhiain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and enthralling from beginning to end. Through this novel we are taken into the heartache of young love, family estrangement, and the horrors of modern day terrorism. This is a very unique story as it is told to us from multiple perspectives, jumping from memory to present day. And don't worry, you don't need to know the tale of Orpheus to get this story, but it certainly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the plot and character development. Genius!

Characters are just alive in this story! You can feel them breathe on you, almost hear them scream their torment out at you from the pages. Whilst that blew me away with this novel, what really struck me was the unique way Hospital interweaves math and music. As a literature student I rarely come across a book involving maths that I can actually enjoy!

SLIGHT SPOILER!!! The character of Mishka/Michael is just wonderfully constructed. A young and extremely passionate musician, you understand everything he is trying to say through his music. As readers, we don't even have the pleasure of hearing it, but at the same time you know him. From the first few lines describing his performance. I was just blown away by it, you KNOW this character by his music that we don't even get a chance to hear.

I am so grateful that this book was on my uni list - otherwise I may not have picked it up to enjoy it! This was a fantastic example of contemporary literature - Australian author too! Even better!

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this novel in 2008 and re-read it this month for my book discussion group. Everyone agreed that it is an ambitious novel that uses the Orpheus myth successfully, showing characters who lose their loves and search them out, often with tragic consequences. It also has a gripping and contemporary plot.

I have long been a fan of Janette Turner Hospital's work and appreciate how she returns again and again to her theme of the thin dividing line between the quotidian world and its dark underside. This theme can play out through the darkness of the human heart or, in this novel, through the dangers of fundamentalism and the way that war can lead civilised nations and individuals into hideous acts. The Orpheus myth is the ideal vehicle for these ideas.

I was mesmerised by this novel when I first read it but on this reading I could see more of its flaws. Perhaps Turner Hospital attempts too much. But she writes brilliantly (the descriptions of the house in the Queensland rainforest is superb) and she deftly explores the complex relationships between the various characters and their pasts. She moves easily between settings in Boston, the American south, Queensland and the Middle East and between the stories of the main characters, Leela, Mishka and Cobb. The role of music and mathematics in the character development and the plot is also ingenious.

Well worth revisiting.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, it is a good thing that I saw Metamorphosis at the Pgh Public, because it helped me understand this book. I believe I have admitted publicly that I made it through 4 yrs of HS and 4 yrs of college without reading any classics/mythology/etc. My aunt, a former hs AP English teacher would be aghast to know this. But somehow, I muddle through life ignorant.
Anyway, this was a pretty good book. Leela picks up and falls in love with a street musician Mishka. Her childhood friend/rival Cobb is a "secret agent" who is investigating terrorists. He informs that Leela, that Miska is involved with terrorists who are setting off bombs in Boston. Who should Leela believe, Mishka or Cobb?
Oh, this book also fits me theme of warm places. Mishka spends his childhood in the jungle of Australia with parrots and tropical plants.

[Marjolein (UrlPhantomhive) · Rating 3 out of 5]

READ IN DUTCH

It may not really come as a surprise that this book is like a modern retelling of the story of Orpheus and Euridice. Although in this book, 'Orpheus' gets lost (the title is already spoiling it, really).



Mishka is a musician, and ironically plays a piece of music about Orpheus on multiple occasions. He's also looking for his Lebanese father, which brings him into a world of terrorism. His girlfriend sets out to find him and bring him back. Sounds familiar huh?



The book has a lot of different setting, America (multiple places), Middle East and Australia. The switching between the places/times got me a bit out of the flow of the book. The story itself was quite interesting and I did like the writing, although it was at times a bit slow.

[Marilyn Darrow-Pinkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fabulous writer. I read her first book, "Ivory Swing" over twenty years ago and decided I would read anything this woman writes. She has never disappointed.
This book explores the world of music and mathematics, politics and fundamentalism within the scope of love, passion and loss. Wonderful characterization and use of language

[Marisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story is fascinating and terrifying! It's a story about brilliance and stupidity, about love and hate and the impact that arrives when these forces collide. The characters each weave between sanity and sheer madness ... wonderful read.

[Heather · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was really a terrible read. Badly written, badly conceived story with characters that didn't work and were unbelievable and inconsistent.

[M Burke · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Eh. A modern Orpheus tale about a mathematician, a musician, and a bounty hunter. The writing was bland."

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Those few of you who regularly read my reviews know that I've set myself a task to read more Australian female authors, and looking back I've covered a bit of ground - Thea Astley, Kate Grenville, Delia Falconer, Elizabeth Jolley, and Shirley Hazzard have all been read so far, with greater or lesser enjoyment. One writer who has eluded me until now is Janette Turner Hospital. She has been on my reading radar for a long time, since the late '80s in fact, but it is only now that I have got around to one of her books. So many books, so little time...

Orpheus Lost is, at base, a story of love, loss, and obsession. We follow the story of Leela, a mathematics academic from the Deep South, who when in Boston meets and falls for Mishka Bartok, a musical genius and ingenue from the Daintree in Queensland. Mishka can only really express himself through music, specifically violin, which comes from his mother's family (Jews who fled Europe after World War Two), and oud which comes from his father's Middle Eastern roots. Mishka has never met his father, whom he believes is dead, and takes up the oud in homage to his memory.

Mishka's world is turned upside-down when a fellow student, an Islamic radical, not only announces that he knows who Mishka's father is, but that he is still alive and living in Beirut. Mishka leaves Leela to find out if this is in fact the case.

Meanwhile Cobb Slaughter, Leela's "blood brother" from her hometown Promised Land, has come back from Afghanistan (where he won a Bronze Star, but also engaged in unauthorised activities) and is working for the Government as a private intelligence operative. Mishka's entanglement with the Islamists has led Cobb to him, and to Leela, who he has loved his whole life, and to whom he wants to cause as much pain as he can.

These plot-lines become more entangled as the story progresses. Leela, who escaped her father's religious insanity, comes to realise through her own loss how the loss of her mother unhinged her father. Cobb comes to realise that seeking revenge is not worth it, and that causing pain just increases the amount of pain in the world. His guilt costs his own life, but saves Mishka's.

Whilst the premise of this book is perhaps hard to believe, Hospital's writing is so effective the reader suspends disbelief almost immediately. Her evocation of the Daintree in particular is lush and rich with visual imagery. In a book where it can be hard to decipher truth from fiction and dreams from reality, Hospital carefully weaves the storyline through multiple lenses, such that the reader is never sure what might be coming next.

The title of the book, and the fact that Mishka plays music of almost unbearable sadness, refers the reader to the myth of Opheus and Eurydice. I'm not sure that Hospital has drawn that link in a way that is too meaningful, and her intent is unclear to me. What she has done is evoke in a powerful way how what happens to us can stay with us, sometimes not for the reasons we might think, and that the human heart makes us work in strange, dangerous and self-harming ways. She reminds us that even in happiness the seed of sadness lurks, and that sorrow can be a very powerful emotion.

Orpheus Lost is a powerful and well-written novel. I can highly recommend it.

Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a complex interweaving of the Orpheus/Euriydice myth with questions around power and control, identity and love. I thought the misogynist abusers in the book on the whole got off too easy and ended up too redeemed (there was sacrifice). Leela was an interesting character, but I would have liked her better if she was less of a femme fatale. I could accept her sexual activity. I could accept Cobb's fatal desire for her as well as her strong connection (sexual and emotional though the sexual was more obvious for most of the story) with Mishka but Berg as well? Why did she have that effect?

I think I have read Janette Turner Hospital write about a musician before in another novel, there music and sex were also intertwined. This one came out better in the end. The stuff around terrorists and military people (including privatised ones and how chilling that is) was frightening. I don't know why the author kept insisting that quandongs are blue when they are actually red (I know I have eaten them). They are also not impossible to grow away from Queensland. I liked the idea of the mansion built out over the water and the feeding of the parrots as well as the haunting music coming from it. I loved the description of maths people, obsessed with numbers (my son is exactly like that).

There was much in the detail and richness of the book to love even though the darkness and violence was always present. Despite Leela's opinions of Cobb I could not like him nor acquit him of blame considering his stupid power-plays got everyone where they ended up. The stuff about trying to visit people in gaol with privatised guards was probably true and really chilling. The mythology was mainly woven in well. I had to laugh at the surname "Slaughter" it reminds me of when we studied Oyster at uni (back when I was a tiny little undergrad) and the lecturer commented that the apt names was a bit heavy-handed. It wasn't so bad in this book though "Bartok" was a bit of a stretch for a musician.

An original and thought-provoking read.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wrote an in-depth review of this novel and then my computer and Word decided to elope together and decided to not even give me the courtesy of AutoSaving my document. grr

Anyway, I enjoyed this novel.
The most interesting part was how much of an asshole Cobb was, but how, in the end, you end up understanding his perspective (if not agreeing with it or liking him as a person). The characters are intriguing and flawed, and as such seem real. The story is less about the plot than it is about them, and they are slowly decrypted through flashbacks about their upbringing and experiences.

Where the novel didn’t succeed was the depiction of anything middle eastern. One of my knowledge gaps involves that area of the world (culturally and geographically) and this novel didn’t provide me any learning into those subjects – merely painted the same picture any US movie would. But the fact that Mishka wasn’t in truth involved in terrorist activities raises poignant questions about “freedom of association” in the United States (or anywhere, really) and how this right is often ignored, especially when it comes to race or culture.

The last third of the novel is very fragmentary and mimetic in terms of characters getting frazzled, which made it somewhat confusing as well as increased the pace to the point of feeling like the information was being thrown out too quickly. Perhaps this was an attempt to mimic staccato or even a crescendo, but it was jarring to me. Especially after the largo of Mishka’s life growing up in Australia.

Yet, the novel is lovely overall – there are both subtle and outright allusions and metaphors to music throughout and the title serves to blanket the novel thematically. It raises interesting questions about family, safety, and isolationism. Overall, a great book.

[Veronique · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a really interesting read and not at all what I expected.
I loved the plot and how it made you question the characters. Also having not read the synopsis, it kept surprising me.
I really liked the character Leena, she was really well written and it made you feel with her. With Mischka and Cobb I had this less. This might be because they were first introduced through Leena and after that got their own story, but I couldn't connect with them that much.

I had some issues with the writing style, there was a lot of times that things were happening in the now and then it was written in a really methaphorical way that I unfortunately couldn't connect with and got lost in what was happening/. What i did love in the writing is the switching between the present and the past. This gave you explanations why some of the characters acted in such a way.
The ending was beautiful and sad, but I would have loved to have lived the ending instead of told it.

[Emily Fletcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oyster was the first book I read from Janette Turner Hospital, and none of her other books had measured to quite that level of greatness for me until Orpheus Lost. For the last 100 pages I was on the edge of my seat, in tears, I audibly gasped twice, and I didn't want the story to end. All of the characters and places felt so vivid and genuine, especially Mishka’s home in the rainforest, and throughout the story the distinct sense of yearning was conveyed so cohesively. Similarly to Jeanette Winterson, I love reading JTH’s writing and seeing how her themes develop as the world and her writing changes. Mishka and Leela's stories are woven in so well with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but grow beyond their inspiration into a stunningly crafted and haunting original piece of literature.

[Nae Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written novel that followed the passion and darkness of Leela and Mishka’s love. The character development of all was enthralling to read. The topic felt somewhat dated in a post 9/11 world that has moved greatly since the book was written, there were many references to terrorist organisations and underlying Islamaphobia that is not (actually) apparent in the contemporary timeline that the novel is set in. This was somewhat jarring to read but gives an interesting insight into the fears held by the west in the early 2000s. The conclusion of this story felt rushed and unsatisfying after the depth of language used throughout the rest of the novel. All in all this was a very good read and a great case study on the anguish that comes with love.

[Robyn Bauer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had such mixed feelings about this one. From the first few pages I found the writing style annoyingly florid and overblown. There was not one aspect of the characters that I could relate to and the exaggerated descriptions of the music and the maths infuriated me. Despite this however, I wanted to know what would happen. The re-imagining of the Orpheus myth had me sucked in and I did not predict the story's resolution and conclusion. Oh and another thing, too many dreams used as lazy plot devices. I'm glad I persevered and finished it. I've read so many other great books lately, I guess I've been spoiled.

[Linda Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened as Audio~ A well paced narrative that had interludes of dreamlike analogies that pointed towards truths and premonitions. Set in America and Australia with links to war zones both past and present and their inherent scars on soldiers and their loved ones. It’s a love story the evolves between two innocents, one a mathematician, the other a musician and is tainted by jealousies, a lust for heritage and terrorism. An interesting backdrop since the latter has become entrenched in our western worlds, and accepted. Where the politics of war and peace tip the scales of sanity and understanding.
A very good and engaging read.

[Trisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another scorchingly gripping story from THE best author I have had the privilege of discovering. Hospital has a unique way of painting characters and their complicated emotions and human conundrums, it takes my breath away every time. A brilliant examination of the psychology of love and hate, self interest and self-sacrifice, and the things we unwittingly find ourselves believing - rightly or wrongly. Thank you, Janette Turner Hospital - another book that will keep me thinking for years to come.
5 ⭐️- no hesitation

[Merrilee Frankish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling and literary. This book is a suspenseful drama- weaving dream like myth with unrequited love, war, terror, love, death, back stories revealed, the power of music, how education transforms people’s lives, abuse, death of parents, hope and family. It is set in the Daintree area, South Carolina, Brisbane, Sydney, New York, Baghdad and Beirut. Told from the point of view of different players, this wonderful story comes together in redeeming conclusion, with a sprinkling of the suspension of reality.

[C.J. Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

A chance encounter between two highly-gifted but lost souls affects their lives personally, and eventually in a global way. The personal side of things I enjoyed: the global foray into terrorism, not so much. After the personal story was done, it felt like the rest was done to add interest or excitement and became increasingly less believable for me. There is a lot to like about the writing style and the development of the main characters but, overall, probably not an author I will return to.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a gripping book, a sort of re-telling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story set mainly in the U.S.A in post 9/11 Islamophobia. There are times when I was confused about whether the characters were dreaming or not, but otherwise it's brilliantly written and a chilling reminder of the atrocities and breaches of human rights that are now commonplace in times of war.

[ˋ°•☆&;josie.ೃ࿐ · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing storyline, this was a reread for me and I enjoyed it immensely. The beginning of the novel for me had a little too much mathematical exploration which took away from the flow of the story for me personally although that may not be the case for everyone else.

An excellent Australian author whom I plan to read much more of this year

[Jackie Alford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, a sad story of the affects of war on past generations and how they affect today's generations as world societies continue with war to present day. The ending, so touching, made me cry.