Elise Blackwell - AN UNFINISHED SCORE | Octavia Books | New Orleans, Louisiana

Start: 06/22/2010 6:00 pm

End: 06/22/2010 7:30 pm

Please join us for an evening with writer Elise Blackwell as we celebrate her new novel, AN UNFINISHED SCORE with a reading and signing.

As she prepares dinner for her husband and their extended family, Suzanne hears on the radio that a jetliner has crashed and her lover is dead. Alex Elling was a renowned orchestra conductor. Suzanne is a concert violist, long unsatisfied with her marriage to a composer whose music turns emotion into thought. Now, more alone than she’s ever been, she must grieve secretly. But as complex as that effort is, it pales with the arrival of Alex’s widow, who blackmails her into completing the score for Alex’s unfinished viola concerto. As Suzanne struggles to keep her double life a secret from her husband, from her best friend, and from the other members of her quartet, she is consumed by memories of a rich love affair saturated with music. Increasingly manipulated by her lover’s widow and tormented by the concerto’s many layers, Suzanne realizes she may lose everything she’s spent her life working for. A story of love, loss, sex, class, and betrayal, this psychologically compelling novel explores the ways that artists’ lives and work interact, the nature of relationships among women as friends and competitors, and what it means to make a life of art.

Elise Blackwell is the author of three previous novels: Hunger, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, and Grub. Her books have been chosen for numerous “best of the year” lists and her short prose has be published in Witness, Topic, Seed, and other publications. Originally from southern Louisiana, she earned her MFA from the University of California-Irvine and is on the creative writing faculty of the University of South Carolina.