Keeping Secrets

Yesterday was spent with a friend I have had for more than 10 years. She has been my guide as I negotiate the travails of a marriage dissolution, failing sight and a new exciting life.

With great excitement she brought out a book she had read recently, The Keeper of Secrets by Julie Thomas.  I read it several months ago on my Kindle and found it a gripping story of classical music, violins, the holocaust and family loss and revival. A quite unrelated conversation with a new friend at the gym led me to the memory of a violin maker who lives near Cambridge where Julie also lives. He makes replicas of the Guarneri De Jesu violin around which the story is based. As a music lover with an unexplainable interest in the holocaust and recent European history this book is enticing. 

Podcasts have become my listening genre as I try to relax and enjoy my hard won holidays. Conversations with Colin Fidler on the ABC are my first choice with interviews on the Radio NZ website a close second. My portable talking book machine, a Victor Reader Stream, has a folder especially for podcasts. Colin's interviews with people who have led both ordinary and amazing lives are both interesting and easy to listen to.

Several weeks ago a friend sent me a link via Facebook to a publishers website   www.knopfdoubleday.com
which lists vintage and anchor books. These are mostly classic and newer novels listed for prizes but many of the books are also true classics. Today I heard of Orhan Pamuk and have ordered his memoir, Istanbul. If the print proves too small I will buy it for my Kindle.

Keeping secrets has led me to research and write the story of my adoptive father who died when I was 5 and of whom I know very little. Secrets have tumbled out over the last few months yet I am struggling to put this story together. I hope to enter it in a competition but if not finished I will find another method of publishing it.