Search results for ""author cello mr"

Classical music can be a dangerous pastime… What with love affairs, their conductor dropping dead, a stolen cello and no money, Stockwell Park Orchestra is having a fraught season. After Mrs Ford-Hughes is squashed and injured by a dying guest conductor mid-concert, she and her husband withdraw their generous financial backing, leaving the orchestra broke and unsure of its future. Cellist Erin suggests a recovery plan, but since it involves their unreliable leader, Fenella, playing a priceless Stradivari cello which then goes missing, it’s not a fool-proof one. Joshua, the regular conductor, can’t decide which affair to commit to, while manager David’s nervous tic returns at every doom-laden report from the orchestra’s treasurer. There is one way to survive, but is letting a tone-deaf diva sing Strauss too high a price to pay? And will Stockwell Park Orchestra live to play another season?

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From the author of Mrs Engels and The Sisters Mao, an intimate family memoir about filial love and its limits, separation, and loss. Gavin is spending the quarantine with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping away. He has returned home to care for her and to write a novel. But all he can write about is her. In this frank and revealing memoir, he unspools an intimate story of his upbringing and early adulthood: feeling out of place as a child, homophobic bullying at school, his brother’s mental illness and drug addiction, his father’s sudden death, his own devastating diagnosis, his struggles and triumphs as a writer, and above all, his relationship with his mother. Her brightness shines a light over his childhood, but her betrayal of his teenage self leads to years of resentment and disconnection. Now, he must find a way to reconcile with her, before it is too late.

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After a brief and disastrous Resident Poet episode, Stockwell Park Orchestra is invited to take part in a TV competition for classical music. For a £50,000 prize some competitors are tempted to stretch the genre to ‘crossover’ and beyond. Can a full concert orchestra compete with jazz bands, horn quartets, harp ensembles, and Mrs Ford-Hughes singing in Portuguese with nine cellos? Or will the competition be derailed by the poet’s return, this time sporting live Ambient Sounds? The TV producers aren’t worried: they know a good fight means great ratings. What was supposed to be a quirky diversion threatens to take over the orchestra’s rehearsals for their own concert, but discovering a voting scam means they must fix things in the TV studio first.

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