Music & Silence – Rose Tremain

It’s 1629 and an English lute player arrives at the court of King Christian IV of Denmark.

Through people’s diaries and memories we learn of the King’s passion for perfection and his desparate need for money, meet paper making Italians and Irish catholic dynasties, and understand how music, and love, can drive you mad, or keep you sane.

And there are some very powerful female contributors: the King’s egotistical and estranged, vicious and vain wife Kirsten who is in the midst of an affair with the elusive Count Otto; Emila, her provincial sensible and savvy maid; the King’s mother devising ever more inventive ways of hiding her hoarded gold from her near-bankrupt son, and the recently widowed Countess O’Fingal, Peter Claire’s former lover, stuck in the wilds of Donegal.

Amaozon.co.uk link: Music & Silence – Rose Tremain