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First Published:
Sep 2005, 320 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2006, 320 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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This article relates to Half Broken Things
Morag Joss
grew up on the west coast of
Scotland, completed a degree in
English at St Andrew's
University and then studied
singing at the Guildhall School
of Music. The trigger for her
start as a writer was in the mid
1980s when family friend P.D.
James came to stay and Joss took
her on a tour of the Roman Baths
in the city of Bath. While
touring the baths Joss jokingly
suggested that 'this would be a
good place to find a body', they
bounced around the idea for a
minute or two and then P.D.
James said 'Oh, you must go and
write it now, dear'. At the
time, Joss didn't take the idea
seriously but a couple of months
later, without telling anyone,
she entered a story-writing
contest sponsored by Good
Housekeeping magazine and was
awarded a prize as a runner-up.
This is her 4th book following
Funeral Music (1998),
Fearful Symmetry (1999) and
Fruitful Bodies (2001),
all set in Bath, England and
based around cellist Sara
Selkirk. Half Broken Things,
her first stand-alone novel,
won the 2003 UK Crime
Writers' Association Silver
Dagger Award.
Her latest novel, Puccini's
Ghosts, was published in the
UK in July 2005, and will be
published in the USA in a couple
of weeks (late Aug 2006). It is
set in a small coastal town in
Scotland in the 1960 and centers
around an amateur production of
Puccini's last opera,
Turandot. Joss says, 'It's
really a coming of age kind of
novel .... I hope it's sort of
grimly funny because the idea of
an amateur production of
Turandot is preposterous. It's
all to do with first falling in
love and that hideously
obsessive way that first love
can practically bring you to
your knees and about the
difference between theatre and
life and reality and illusion.'
This "beyond the book article" relates to Half Broken Things. It originally ran in October 2005 and has been updated for the
July 2006 paperback edition.
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