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On August 2, 2021, at 7 p.m. Eastern, the All But True series presents two award-winning historical novels about musicians fleeing persecution. The series is still on Zoom, via the bookstore A Novel Idea on Passyunk. Go here to register.
In Jennifer Steil’s Exile Music, winner of the Grand Prize in the Eyelands Book Awards, Orly is just ten years old when she flees Vienna with her musician parents to escape the Nazis. They end up in La Paz, Bolivia, where they are haunted by all they left behind—friends, relatives, and a life in music. Orly adapts well, but as she matures, she questions her own identity and sexuality. Then war criminals arrive, and a family secret puts Orly and her parents once more at risk.
In Jennifer Steil’s Exile Music, winner of the Grand Prize in the Eyelands Book Awards, Orly is just ten years old when she flees Vienna with her musician parents to escape the Nazis. They end up in La Paz, Bolivia, where they are haunted by all they left behind—friends, relatives, and a life in music. Orly adapts well, but as she matures, she questions her own identity and sexuality. Then war criminals arrive, and a family secret puts Orly and her parents once more at risk.
“Steil expertly weaves historical details into this immersive narrative, complete with a focus on the impact of music in the characters’ lives.” --Publishers Weekly
“. . . a beautiful coming-of-age tale, following Orly as she questions her sexuality and struggles to come to terms with the horrors she escaped in her homeland.” --Booklist
Marjorie Sandor’s novel The Secret Music at Tordesillas, winner of the Tuscarora Award in Historical Fiction, is set in 1555. Juana I of Castile has died after 47 years in forced seclusion. Her last musician, Juan de Granada, refuses to depart with the other servants, forcing two functionaries of the Inquisition to interrogate him in the empty palace. But is it really empty? Or is there a heretic hidden on the premises, secretly practicing the forbidden rites of Judaism? Only Juan knows the answer, and his subversive tale is at once a ballad of lost love and a last gambit to save a life.
“Radiant, passionate, deeply intelligent and intensely moving, this brilliant novel brings alive a place and time surprisingly resonant with our own. Love and music burn like a laser through these glorious pages.” —Andrea Barrett
“An historical novel of striking imagination and lyricism” —Phillip Lopate
Jennifer Steil is a writer, teacher, and secret ballet dancer who lives in many countries (currently Uzbekistan, France, England). In addition to Exile Music, she is the author of the novel The Ambassador’s Wife, which won the Phillip McMath Post Publication book award and the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Best Novel Award; and The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, a memoir about running a newspaper in Yemen.
Marjorie Sandor’s previous books include the linked story collection Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime, winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award in Fiction, and The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction. She is also the editor of The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows, an international anthology of short fiction. Recently retired from the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University, she lives in Corvallis, Oregon, with her husband, writer Tracy Daugherty.
