Puccini's Ghosts

by Morag Joss

Book Overview

CWA Silver Dagger Award winner Morag Joss peers into the soul of a wounded family in this haunting, harrowing masterpiece of psychological suspense. With equal parts subtlety and menace, Joss takes us on a dizzying journey toward a collision between fantasy and reality--and an astounding moment of revelation that shatters illusions, hopes, and lives forever.

The year is 1960. The place is a Scottish seaside town utterly devoid of culture and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385340907
• ISBN13: 9780385340908
• Release Date: July 2007
• Publisher: Delta
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The power of the voice

I read Joss just for the descriptions. Really, they are so fraught. Her language elevates the genre. Take, for example, this passage from pp. 52-53 of PUCCINI'S GHOSTS: "He lies in a coffin in a room without windows. There are more chairs and acryclic flowers and bibles, but I don't take in any more detail than that. It's cold. The air conditioning makes distant, electrical lapping sounds and in the glowing yellow light everything in the room looks buttered. I want to see his hands. One rests over the other across his torso and they look hard and waxy now, but I know them. I saw them lift teacups, wash carrots under the garden tap, but the surprising trust I feel about these hands means, I suppose, that they must also have spooned food into me, picked me up after falling, tidied my fringe out of my eyes, though I do not remember." Bravo, Morag Joss.

Musical mystery fun

I am so glad I didn't read the Booklist review (above) of this romp before reading the book... why do "reviewers" feel they have to spill the beans on plot points? And in this case, the information is not only disturbing, one key point it is actually wrong. The book is fun and it helps to be listening to Turandot while reading. In parts, it is downright hilarious, dangerous to read in public.

That Summer

An unhappy middle-aged woman, estranged from her family, goes home after many years for her father's funeral. While putting his effects in order, she recalls the long-ago summer of 1960, when she was a reckless, dreamy 15-year-old. Piece by piece, memory by memory, we witness the devastating series of events that destroyed her and her world. This is my favorite kind of mystery--a psychological suspense story of the heart and mind. The main character, Liza, is a vivid creation, and her family is unforgettable. PUCCINI'S GHOSTS is a haunting, heartbreaking, peculiarly British tale in the style of Ruth Rendell and Minette Walters, by one of the best new voices in mystery fiction. (Her previous novel, HALF BROKEN THINGS, is also excellent.)

terrific drama

When her father dies, retired opera chorister, Lila DuCann, returns to her hometown Burnhead, Scotland to attend his funeral. She has been away from the town for years and has not seen her dad in a long time. Thus when she grieves her loss she is taken aback as memories of 1960, the fateful "Turandot Summer" when she was fifteen years old, flow freely. Her lunatic thirtyish Uncle George Pettifer, a London music teacher, obstinately decides to direct a local production of Puccini's opera Turandot starring Lila's mom Florence "Fleur" Duncan as the title character and Lila in the support female role as slave girl Liu. Local amateur musicians and singers round out the cast. Thus only Fleur had any real experience and she never moved far up the singer's food chain. However Fleur felt she was just one song from being discovered and being treated like a pampered adored Prima Donna. To provide some quality, George brings his London friend Joe Foscari to serve as the male lead. Lila falls in love her first crush, but the failed presentation only highlighted the flop of her family leading to a tragedy and a teen in exile from her home. PUCCINI'S GHOSTS is a terrific drama that grips readers as they wonder what happened in the summer of 1960 that destroyed a family. As Lila tells the tale from her perspective looking back to when she was a teen, fans will soon wonder whether she can delineate reality from a fantasy created perhaps out of FEARFUL SYMMETRY of what is truth. Morag Joss provides a virtuoso performance (sans Sara Selkirk) with the attendees listening to FUNERAL MUSIC and knowing first hand about dreams of HALF BROKEN THINGS. Harriet Klausner

Musical madness

Retired opera chorister, Lila DuCann, returns to her home town to bury her father, after an absence of many years. The unexpected grief she experiences causes her mind to slip back and forth between the present time and the time when, as a 15 year old, she took part in what was to be a local production of Puccini's opera, Turandot. Her uncle George conceived the crazy plan of producing the opera in a large, local barn, using untrained locals as singers and musicians, with Lila's mother Fleur, a former small time singer, in the lead role and Lila in the secondary female role. Fleur, always an unstable wannabe, sees herself as an undiscovered diva and behaves accordingly, while Lila discovers that she has an undiscovered talent as a soprano. Geoge introduces Joe, a friend from London, as the male lead, who immediately becomes the object of Lila's first major crush. The ensuing fiasco highlights the entire family's terrible unhappiness, and results in tragedy and misery all around. It's not a happy book but is certainly a brilliant piece of writing.