Distant Music
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A richly imaginative novel of love, loss, time and the rise and fall of a great maritime empire, that sends two thwarted lovers spiralling through the chaos of history.
The story begins in 1429 on Madeira, when a peasant girl meets a boy- a Jewish outsider- from a Portuguese sailing ship. Esperança and Emmanuel know they must part when the ship sails. From that first meeting and parting, others follow...
Emmanuel is in turn sailor, mapmaker, bookseller, jazz musician; Esperança an illiterate peasant, a rich girl in Faro and a clever, bookish recluse who confronts a murderer in nineteenth-century Lisbon. In twentieth-century London, Esperança is faced with a double incarnation, one of the true Emmanuel and the other a shadow. Over the centuries the couple face peril and tenderness. Each life is short. What survives is love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two lovers persist in an oft-thwarted affair through six centuries and multiple incarnations in this richly suggestive novel, a blend of Jewish history and romance. In Madeira in 1429, a Catholic peasant girl named Esperan a falls in love with Emmanuel, a Jewish youth off a ship temporarily anchored in the harbor. The narrative then loops ahead to Faro in 1489, where Esperan a is a 15-year-old rich Catholic noblewoman and Emmanuel is a lowly printer's apprentice. The two love stories are a joining of intellectuals, with Emmanuel teaching both Esperan as to read Hebrew and to appreciate the printed page. The second Esperan a converts to Judaism and with Manuel and their two children, endures the horror of the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal. Langley ingeniously reprises the same unlikely love story twice more, first in Lisbon in 1855, where the upper-class Esperan a risks her life to exonerate the reputation of the eccentric bookseller Emmanuel, who has been accused of murder, and in present-day London, where a Catholic woman named Esperan a (who has shortened her name to Hope) marries Dan, a Jew, though she loves his brother. A variation on the Kabbalistic phenomenon of gilgul, which allows for the reincarnation of unfulfilled souls, the novel demonstrates that true love can traverse epochs and social hierarchies. Though the personalities of Esperan a and Emmanuel change and develop in their various manifestations, the novel is essentially a beautifully detailed history of Portugal, particularly of the lives of Sephardic Jews, with the leitmotif of outsiders in a culture closed to them. Langley's previous novel, Persistent Rumours, won a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and this lyrical and resonant work shares the same assured and vibrant style.
