{"product_id":"puccinis-ghosts-isbn-9780385340908","title":"Puccini's Ghosts","description":"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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe year is 1960. The place is a Scottish seaside town utterly devoid of culture and charm. Here, Lila lives as the third player in her parents’ dramatically embittered marriage. Until her flamboyant, irrepressible uncle George shows up from London and her family decides to squander a windfall on the most preposterous of causes: a civic production of the Puccini opera Turandot.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLila knows nothing of opera and little of her uncle or the dashing young man he hires to sing the role of Calaf. But Lila does know passion. Because it’s coursing through her veins—and rushing blindly, wildly all around her. Now a girl on the verge of womanhood is about to blunder into a grown-up world where secrets are kept and exposed, hopes soar and wither, and where crimes petty and great exact the most chilling punishments of all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMasterfully paced and spellbinding till its final, haunting scene, \u003cb\u003ePuccini’s Ghosts\u003c\/b\u003e is a piercing look into the fierce darkness that lurks behind seemingly ordinary lives.“Morag Joss has been compared to those other two premiere weird sisters in crime, Ruth Rendell\/Barbara Vine and Minette Walters. Such compliments are tossed about all too lightly in the publishing world, but this one is so justified that it seems like an understatement.”—\u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A cast of expertly drawn characters.\"—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eMorag Joss grew up on the west coast of Scotland. Her first Sara Selkirk novel, \u003cb\u003eFuneral Music\u003c\/b\u003e, was nominated by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association for the Dilys Award for the year’s favorite mystery. Her fourth novel, \u003cb\u003eHalf Broken Things\u003c\/b\u003e, won the 2003 CWA Silver Dagger Award. Morag Joss lives in the country outside the city of Bath and in London.Now I’m here I begin to sense the trouble I’m in. I’m back at the window  but the view has changed. I haven’t switched on a light so I’m standing in  the dark watching night colours gleam through the glass: silvered wet  tarmac, darts of rain caught in the cloudy glow under the streetlights and  across the road, garden walls soaked in warm, sodium glare. There are no  streetlights on our side—they belong to the new houses—but their orange  sheen leaks as far as our privet hedge, staining its green leaves brown.  The old road is a street now. At intervals across it there are lumps lying  in wait to slow the traffic; even at this hour one or two cars pass. The  beam of their white headlamps tilts and dips and steadies as they curtsey  over the bumps and then they pick up speed with the fizz of tyres on the  wet road, pulling their shadows after them. I follow the line of  streetlights stretching through the sky all the way back to the bridge,  receding spangles of orange distorted by the rain on the window into a row  of tiny bursting suns. Behind me, the room creaks with damp, its emptiness  sighs. But I will not turn round yet, nor switch on a light. I know what  it would show me. I shall carry on standing here, looking out and feeling  ridiculous.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What was the rush? Why did I drop everything and come immediately to  arrive so late at night, when tomorrow would have done? When they rang to  tell me he was dead I came at once as if, having just died, he might be  still within reach, somehow not quite gone. His death reminds me of  something obvious that I feel stupid for having overlooked, that he was  old and one day would die, and yet how can he leave like this, a man who  never did anything sudden in his life? I talked to him in my head all the  way here. I told him I was sorry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I’m sorry, I say again now.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    All I hear in reply is his tired voice, Och, Lizzie. His voice comes to  me, it seems, from a great distance. He sounds lost and cut-off as if he  has got himself stranded somewhere, though he isn’t crying for help; he  is, if anything, resigned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Och, Lizzie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I can’t tell if he means it as dismissal or forgiveness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Maybe it isn’t so ridiculous, my jumping to attention now he has died;  maybe it’s an effect the newly dead have on the rest of us. And am I  acting any more suddenly than he did? Off he goes raising a cloud of dust  and up I start, needing to move in some direction or another, as if giving  chase. It’s the kind of thing, scrupulously misinterpreted to feed their  hunger for a disgraceful tale, that people round here get their teeth  into. I can hear their voices, too.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Doesn’t see him for years but she’s here fast enough to hear the will read.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I don’t know if he made a will. But even while I’m booking a flight,  packing, cancelling appointments, I think I make out a shape in the dust  as it begins to settle, some dark weight he left behind. It’s cumbersome,  as heavy as history, and I have no use for it, yet I can’t leave it lying  unclaimed. It’s the past, and now it’s mine and I have to do something  with it. He’s not been dead a day but I intend to be practical about it,  as I will be about his other things. Already they are no longer just his  things but obstacles of a kind, an affront to order, a challenge to the  clarity of what belongs where and to whom. I am unsettled by the sudden  knowledge that, for an interval at least, everything the dead leave behind  is still theirs and yet no-one’s, though I’m not sure if this question of  ownership is a trivial or a profound matter. But what a strange hurry I  feel to bestow or destroy, as if his belongings might be dangerous if they  are not at once attached elsewhere. I don’t care where they go as long as  I get them off my hands, and it’s the same with this story of our past.  It’s a shapeless load with one straggling thread, its unsatisfactory  ending, that trails from it like a fuse. I want it tucked out of sight. I  have to find somewhere to dump it, some unvisited place in my mind, a kind  of mental cupboard under the stairs for a filled sack of worn-out memories.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    They’ll expect a show at the funeral. Not necessarily of grief, but  they’ll expect me to make myself somehow conspicuous; I’m sure there are  still those who like to think I’m as bad as my mother. Thinks she’s the  next Maria Callas your mum, everybody says so, Enid used to say, smirking  at the very idea, and I would snigger with embarrassment because my mother  did think that. Or believed she might have been if my father hadn’t ruined  her chances, as she so perfectly rewrote events. In my mother’s mind she  and my father are Persephone and Pluto; he practically threw her in a sack  and bore her down into darkness although he, lacking any authority, makes  an improbable god of the underworld. But by the time I’m fifteen I believe  completely in her shuttered and powerless misery, which seems  irreversible. She lives here as if unable to break out of some truly  dreadful contract, under a form of house arrest that leaves her in turn  distraught and enervated. All that changes, of course, but I cannot look  round from the window now that this recollection is upon me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Behind me she sits, with Uncle George. They’re lingering over breakfast,  I’m clearing it away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I need a day off. The voice is tired, she tells him. I’m tired, vocally.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I remember now, she’s in a sulk because he has made her give up cigarettes  but is still smoking himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He says, But you don’t know the part properly yet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I don’t want to get stale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Come on, Florrie, he says, wise up. If Callas spends every hour God sends  preparing a role, why shouldn’t you?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He’s the one who sounds tired. He has his chin cupped in the hand that  holds the cigarette and threads of smoke are weaving up through his hair,  silvery blue into chestnut. With the spent match in his other hand he is  stirring a little paste he has made out of toast crumbs and leftover  butter on the side of his plate, black into pale yellow, over a pattern of  ferns.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Don’t call me Florrie, she says, waving away the smoke. It’s Fleur. And  don’t talk to me about Callas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    She stands, sets her shoulders wide, looks through this window and arches  her eyebrows. Out pours the final phrase of ‘\u003ci\u003eVissi d’arte\u003c\/i\u003e’ from \u003ci\u003eTosca\u003c\/i\u003e,  minus the words, for she doesn’t know them beyond the first two lines. I  notice how unused her lips are to being stretched, as if they haven’t done  enough laughing. Uncle George looks away and smiles his private smile with  one last drag on the cigarette, which he stubs out in the paste of crumbs  and butter. The way it hisses a little seems to seal the point, as far as  I am concerned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Of all those people who said my mother thought she was the next Maria  Callas, I wonder how many are still here.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When I arrived, I found the key where it’s always been behind the loose  brick in the garage wall. I stepped through the kitchen and into the back  room that my father’s life had shrunk to fit: one armchair, the  television, everything else on castors. At once I snapped off the light  and came in here to the dining room. In a minute or two I’ll find my way  upstairs in the dark and grope around for blankets in the landing  cupboard. I cannot bear bleak electric light scouring the corners and  washing out shadows, showing me how unchanged everything is.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I’ll linger here just a while longer. In the silences between cars I  listen for the rasp of the incoming water of the Firth up the beach not  far behind the house, but maybe I only imagine I can hear it, in the same  way that I imagine the moon, invisible tonight behind clouds, pulling the  tide across the shore. I like such commonplace movements as these: the  coming and going of the sea, the falling of rain, the passing of cars. In  this dead room, from behind the glass, I feel I am witnessing a kind of  breathing.","brand":"Delta","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301584294117,"sku":"NP9780385340908","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780385340908.jpg?v=1767735200","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/puccinis-ghosts-isbn-9780385340908","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}