Orpheus Lost: A Novel - Hardcover

Hospital, Janette Turner

3.64

744 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393065529 ISBN 13: 9780393065527

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

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In this powerful and passionate new novel, Janette Turner Hospital tackles head-on questions of national security, art, terrorism, and love.

Leela is a mathematician who has escaped her Southern hometown to study in Boston. She meets an Australian musician, Mishka, and from the moment she first hears him play his music grips her; they quickly become lovers. Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation center somewhere outside the city. There has been an explosion in the subway; terrorism is suspected. The interrogator―an old childhood friend―now reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture, and despair in search of her lover. Janette Turner Hospital, whose works are "richly imbued with a highly lyrical and luminous quality" (San Diego Union-Tribune) again shows her genius, interweaving a literary thriller with a story of passion and the triumph of decency in confusing and dangerous times.

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About the Author:

Janette Turner Hospital received Australia's Patrick White Award for lifetime literary achievement, and is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

From AudioFile:

Music and mythology combine in Janette Turner Hospital's look at love in the time of terrorism. Leela, a brilliant MIT graduate student in mathematics, follows street musician Mishka Bartok's bewitching violin solo down into the Boston subway. His music enchants her, and so does Mishka. But their love affair is interrupted when Mishka disappears after a series of terrorist bombings. Edwina Wren's voice is dewy, fresh, and clear as she narrates this complex, convoluted retelling of the Orpheus myth. She brings a sweet lyricism to the love affair, but she's less successful when the story descends into cruelty and revenge. Alternating between the lovers' early lives and the disastrous conditions of post-9/11 America, Hospital's rich, dense prose leads listeners down subterranean passages of the human soul. S.J.H. � AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

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