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Music and Freedom

Music and Freedom

by Zoe Morrison
Paperback
Publication Date: 27/06/2016

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A gripping and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Elizabeth is Missing and the work of Elizabeth Harrower

Alice Haywood is born on an orange farm in country New South Wales. She begins playing the piano when she is three, taught by her English mother who is unhappy in Australia and in a desolate, violent marriage. When Alice is seven, her mother, desperate for her daughter to leave if she can't, sends her to boarding school in the bleak north of England, and there Alice stays for the next ten years. Then she's offered a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London.

That year, on a summer school in Oxford, she meets Edward, an economics professor, who sweeps her off her feet.  But underneath his suave demeanor, Edward is a damaged man. He traps her into marriage and Alice is stuck, oppressed by his cruelty, in the Oxford home he has bought for her. After a disastrous recital of Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto, she stops playing and her dreams of becoming a concert pianist evaporate.  Alice and Edward have a son, Richard, whom she adores. He too is a talented musician.

But as Richard grows up he becomes more and more distant, and ultimately Alice can't find it in herself to carry on. Then she starts to hear the most beautiful music coming from the walls of her house.  Inspiring and unusual, this novel's love story is that of a woman who must embrace life again if she is to survive. With a wonderful cast led by Alice, the novel explores the dark terrain of violence and the transformative powers of music, and love.

Winner of the Readings Prize for New Austalian Fiction 2016

ISBN:
9781925324204
9781925324204
Category:
Contemporary fiction
Format:
Paperback
Publication Date:
27-06-2016
Publisher:
Random House Australia
Country of origin:
Australia
Edition:
1st Edition
Pages:
352
Dimensions (mm):
233x154x26mm
Weight:
0.46kg
Zoe Morrison

Zoë Morrison is the author of the novel Music and Freedom, shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction and commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript.

She has a DPhil in Human Geography from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, before working as a college lecturer.

Her research work has included the fields of gendered violence and social justice. Zoë also studied piano performance at the Adelaide Conservatorium of Music. She lives in Melbourne.

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