Meet Sadie, the high-flying divorce lawyer who ends up putting marriages back together; the Ice Cream Girl, discovered in a superette and transplanted to Hollywood; the seven-year-old Prometheus, who faces death on a daily basis. With a mix of humour and compassion, each story carries the punch of a compacted novel, highlighting those illuminating moments of human connection.
A best-selling, compelling and evocatively realised novel based on real events and figures, which has now sold into nine different countries around the world.
In June 1941, Nazi troops march on Leningrad and surround it. Hitler’s plan is to shell, bomb and starve the city into submission. Most of the cultural élite are evacuated early in the siege, but Dmitri Shostakovich, the most famous composer in Russia, stays on to defend his city, digging ditches and fire-watching. At night he composes a new work.
But after Shostakovich and his family are forced to evacuate, only Karl Eliasberg — a shy and difficult man, conductor of the second-rate Radio Orchestra — and an assortment of musicians are left behind in Leningrad to face an unendurable winter and start rehearsing the finished score of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.
SARAH QUIGLEY was born in Christchurch, New Zealand. She is a novelist, critic, non-fiction writer, poet and columnist. She has a D.Phil. in Literature from the University of Oxford, and is a graduate of Bill Manhire’s creative writing course. In 1998 she won the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship, and in 2000 was awarded the inaugural Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers’ Residency. Her short stories and poetry have been widely broadcast and published, and she has won many prizes, including the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Award and the Commonwealth Pacific Rim Short Story Award. Her publications include novels, short fiction, a creative writing manual and poetry collections, many of which have sold internationally.
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First published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2017
Text © Sarah Quigley, 2017
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Author photograph by Sebastian Schrade
Permission was granted to reproduce extracts from the following poems:
Excerpt from ‘Elegy for N.N.’ From New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 by Czeslaw Milosz (Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2001). Copyright © Czeslaw Milosz Royalties Inc., 1988, 1991, 1995, 2001. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpt from ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost. Reproduced by permission of Henry Holt.
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ISBN: 978-0-14-377102-9
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Suicide Club, The Page 38
