AUTHOR DISCUSSION ABOUT NOVEL:

These are tales of hardship, of yearning and of celebration.

A young boy plays the violin for his mother in Melbourne. Nina Simone sings ‘Pirate Jenny’ in a bar in Berlin. A fisherman plays a flute on the Mekong. And the strains of Paganini resonate in the forests of eastern Poland. From the cabarets and houseboats of 1940s Baghdad, to the streets of war-torn Saigon, and the canals and alleys of present-day Venice, music weaves through each of these spellbinding true stories.

These are tales of hardship, of yearning and of celebration. Tales that span the globe, and bring us back to Melbourne to the extraordinary story of Amal, her flight from Iraq, her fears boarding the unseaworthy boat Australians would come to know as SIEV X, her night spent clinging to a corpse alone in the sea, and her desire to have her story told.

‘Maybe this is why I am alive,’ Amal says, ‘to tell the story of the people who sank in the ocean.’