Love Song of Lucy McBride

And she knew beyond doubt, that whatever Fortuny may have achieved in life, he would have thrown it all away, just to be Lucy, right now, standing at the lights, with it all in front of her. When thirteen-year-old Lucy McBride is awoken one afternoon in her Brisbane garden by the haunting sounds of a cello, she falls in love with the music. Later, she falls in love with a post-war photograph of the musician, Paolo Fortuny, an aristocratic Venetian maestro. An obsession with Fortuny's world, art and the dreams of being one of its elect becomes the secret passion of her adolescent years. But when she is finally given her dream and enters the reality of Fortuny's life, its closed society and Old World assumptions, she dismantles her hero with a ruthlessness that causes her to define everything she's ever lived for. 'Carroll writes with a powerful control that left me moved, shocked, even devastated.' JOHN HANRAHAN, Overland 'Carroll ...has the happy knack of being able to hint obliquely at situations and events of some magnitude, thereby endowing the mundane with a curious but convincing urgency.' ANDREW REIMER, The Age.


Genre: General Fiction