Cirrus@Austlit

'Virginia Lloyd spent much of her childhood and adolescence learning and playing the piano, and thought she would make a career as a pianist. She originally started writing this book to understand the mystery of her very musical and deeply unhappy grandmother, Alice, and how their lives both at and away from the piano intersected and diverged.

'Girls at the Piano also explores the changing relationship between women and the piano over the course of the instrument's 275-year history. Taking us from the salons of 18th century Europe to an amateur jazz workshop in Manhattan in the early 21st, this is a richly layered memoir that traces the experiences of real and fictional women at the piano over the course of the instrument's history. Funny, tender and fascinating, it is an elegant and multilayered meditation on identity, ambition and doubt, and how learning the piano had a profound effect on two women, worlds and generations apart.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Single at 32, married at 33, and widowed at 34

'Virginia Lloyd finally meets the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with, only to discover that he is dying from cancer.  After John dies, Virginia must battle the chronic rising damp in the house they shared.  And so in her first year as a young widow, Virginia, like the house, must dry from the inside out.

'The Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement is a wry and touching love story that plays with the parallels between our homes and ourselves.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.