Lend me a tenor

Speranza

                         

The Virtuoso

Margriet De Moor (Ina Rilke).

 

 In Margriet de Moor's prize-winning novel a strange and extraordinary love story unfolds amid the carriages, churches, and shadowed harbors of eighteenth-century Napoli.

 

For one entire opera season, Carlotta, a Neapolitan duchess, sits in her candle-lit box captive to her passion for Gasparo, the tantalizing castrato with whom she has been smitten since their childhood together in a small Italian village.

 

De Moor recreates the world of Italian music and Napoli's fashionable aristocracy with a sensuality that takes the breath away.

 

First published in Holland, and since translated into thirteen languages, this unusual tale of song and sensuality has seduced readers around the world, taking them from the grand stage of Italian opera to the most intimate moments lovers share.

 

A novel of sweeping gestures with delicate grace notes, The Virtuoso is a story of an exceptional place and exceptional passion.

 

Margriet de Moor lives in Amsterdam. She studied piano and singing at the Academy of Music in the Netherlands. Her first book, a collection of short stories, was an immediate success and she went on to win the Van der Hoogt Prize for three novellas. Her first full-length novel First Gray, Then White, Then Blue won the prestigious Ako Prize and was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize