Distant Music: A Novel

Distant Music: A Novel by Langley, Lee. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781571310408.

In a love story spanning six centuries, Lee Langley creates four vivid worlds. Magically linked, each grips and fascinates in a novel of love, loss, and time. The story begins in 1429 on Madeira, an island consumed by a fire that has blazed for seven years. A peasant girl of fifteen meets a boy - a Jewish outsider - off a Portuguese sailing ship. Esperanca yearns for knowledge; Emmanuel opens her mind to other worlds. The lovers know they must part when the ship sails. From that first meeting and parting, others follow. Portugal, with its golden light, wildflowers, and vineyards, is the setting. Emmanuel is in turn a sailor, printers apprentice, book seller, and musician. Esperanca, seen first as an illiterate peasant girl, is next encountered as a spoiled daughter of Faros privileged class; then a clever, bookish woman dangerously involved in a string of murders in nineenth-century Lisbon. In present-day London she is a woman who has lost her memory, fleeing from an unnamed threat. Each time Esperanca meets Emmanuel there is a spark of recognition, an intimate conversation resumed across space and time. Each time their love is set against the perilous history of the Jews in Portugal. Like a symphony in which movements reprise and enlarge their themes, the book builds to a harmonious and satisfying conclusion. Lee Langley masterfully depicts the struggle to define identity against swirl of history. Over the centuries the lovers face peril, tenderness, horror. What survives is love.