Tag Archives: opera singer

Unseen Unsung – eBook out now

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Unseen ebook coverF

Luca, a brilliant and self-absorbed young opera singer, is buried in the rubble of a collapsed building. A girl crawls through the debris to comfort him and then vanishes. perhaps she died in the ruins or maybe she just a figment of his imagination. When he discovers the strange truth, he is unwilling to accept it.

This is a story of love between two people who would never have met and never have found common ground without one of the catastrophes of modern life.

Unseen Unsung celebrates the power of music and the force of human survival in a complex world.

The concept for Unseen Unsung started life way back in 1999 when I imagined people stuck under the rubble after an earthquake in Turkey. I was enjoying myself plotting, writing and character-building when 9/11 jolted the world. I found the axis had shifted; the story felt too light in the changed world and I set the project aside for over a year.

This is a book, not about disasters, but about life and music, about ordinary people coping with what life throws at them, big and small. In it I have allowed my passion for music, in particular opera, (fairly) free rein, but, as one reviewer wrote, “please don’t think you have to be an opera lover to read this book”.

Although Unseen Unsung was published as a print version in 2008, I went to talk to a reading group last year, who had obtained second-hand copies through the Internet, so I am hoping people will still find it enjoyable. I decided to turn it into an ebook in order to learn the ropes for the publication of my new novel Border Line, which will be coming out in December.

The ebook of Unseen Unsung is available at http://www.amazon.com/Unseen-Unsung-Hilary-Custance-Green-ebook/dp/B00LSRI2PO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405942187&sr=8-1&keywords=Unseen+Unsung and https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/unseen-unsung/id899213653?ls=1&mt=11

I hope some of you will try it and enjoy it. Correction. That’s supposed to read – Please buy my book!

 

 

writing, painting and Tolstoy

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I am more than half way through Anna Karenina now, and I had an ongoing draft blog about several things that struck me. However, this morning I read Tolstoy’s description of an artist letting visitors into his studio to look at his latest painting. Tolstoy writes about the moment that the artist, unveiling the painting, sees it anew from another’s point of view. “…he saw it with their indifferent, estranged, new eyes and found nothing good in it.” He saw banality and a “heap of defects”.

The idea of their attention excites the artist, the smallest praise, the slightest suggestion of defects affects him deeply and alters his own judgement of his work. The fact that he had assessed his visitors fairly accurately on sight and knew that they were unlikely to offer him constructive comments does not alter their effect on him.

Although Tolstoy is talking about painting, every word can be translated to written work. Since I started writing I have been baffled at how one day you can read a piece you have written and be surprised how well it reads and a few days later the same passages will strike you as banal or defective in some way. Pick up the book a year later and you could have either of these reactions. It is as if some malign optician is forever changing your glasses until you have no idea when you are seeing straight.

In October I will be meeting a reading group to discuss a novel about an opera singer I published in 2008 (Unseen Unsung). I will have to re-read it. Will I be appalled, amazed, embarrassed? I really wish I knew.