Odette

Odette

Jessica Duchen

Jessica Duchen

When a swan crashes through her window at the height of a winter storm, journalist Mitzi Fairweather decides to nurse the injured bird back to health. But at sunset, the swan becomes a woman. This unexpected visitor is Odette, the swan princess – alone, adrift and in danger in 21st-century Britain, entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers. Bird by day, human by night, and with no way to go home, she remains convinced, to Mitzi's distress, that only a man's vow of eternal love can break her spell. Mitzi is determined to help Odette, but as the two try to hide the improbable truth, their web of deception grows increasingly tangled. Can they find a way to save Odette before it's too late?
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Ghost Variations

Ghost Variations

Jessica Duchen

Jessica Duchen

The strangest detective story in the history of music – inspired by a true incident.A world spiralling towards war. A composer descending into madness. And a devoted woman struggling to keep her faith in art and love against all the odds.1933. Dabbling in the fashionable "Glass Game" – a Ouija board – the famous Hungarian violinist Jelly d'Arányi, one-time muse to composers such as Bartók, Ravel and Elgar, encounters a startling dilemma. A message arrives ostensibly from the spirit of the composer Robert Schumann, begging her to find and perform his long-suppressed violin concerto.She tries to ignore it, wanting to concentrate instead on charity concerts. But against the background of the 1930s depression in London and the rise of the Nazis in Germany, a struggle ensues as the "spirit messengers" do not want her to forget.The concerto turns out to be real, embargoed by Schumann's family for fear that it betrayed his mental disintegration: it was...
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