Puccini’s Ghosts

The hauntingly evocative literary novel from the highly acclaimed author of “Half Broken Things” will reach an even broader audience. It is the summer of 1960 and fifteen-year-old Lila’s life is about to change forever. Set free from the confines of school, her new prison is the small unremarkable town of Bumhead on the west coast of Scotland. She dreams of escape: from Bumhead, from the damp, from her mother’s hysterics, her father’s stolidity, and her parents’ loveless marriage. Salvation arrives in the form of her beloved Uncle George, a music teacher from London who decides to stage an amateur production of Puccini’s Turandot. Lila, in love for the first time, maps out a future for herself in which reality and fantasy fuse to form a dangerous mixture, threatening to destroy herself and all those around her.