Cirrus@Austlit

'‘I want to tell a story. A long but simple story. A tale of long recovery. A tale of love. A tale of lost and found.’

'In his remarkable new novel, award-winning Australian author Michael Meehan sensitively explores the links between generational conflict, family, and the creative act.

'At its heart An Ungrateful Instrument is a novel that portrays a son’s struggle to be more than a mere instrument of the father’s ambition. Antoine Forqueray and later his son Jean-Baptiste, were each brought up as child prodigies to the court of Louis XIV. Together, they were said to be the only musicians in France who could play the father’s brilliant, eccentric music for the viola da gamba.

'In an imaginative masterstroke the story is told by Jean-Baptiste’s highly attuned mute sister, Charlotte-Elisabeth. Threaded throughout, deep in a forest an old man creates the gift of a special viol for the boy, Jean Baptiste.

'This is a novel that can almost be heard like music, as it soars in language, theme, and a wisdom that both embodies and transcends its period setting.'(Publication summary)

'Martin Frobisher has been beating close family members about the head with an epergne. Frobisher, successful publisher and community leader, is in the City Remand Centre, awaiting trial for murder. What shadow has fallen across the comfortable lives of Frobisher, his ambitious wife Coralie and her flaky sister Madeleine? What has led a cultivated and reflective man, known to shoo spiders and earwigs out of the harm's way, to such reckless acts of violence?

'With the prospect of imprisonment for the term of his natural life, can Frobisher and his research assistant Petra find guidance in the life and fortunes of a brilliant young Englishman, marooned in Australia, "the land of vulgarity and mob rule" more than a century earlier, and obsessed with the darker moments in the nation's history? Why does Frobisher appear to care more, in the end, about the life of Marcus Clarke than he does about his own?' (From the publisher's website.)

'From the blood-soaked streets of the 1870 siege of Paris, to the tear-gas and chaos of its student riots of 1968; from the desolate, windswept Australian desert to the appalling dank prisons of 19th Century New Caledonia, Deception tells an epic, dramatic story of a search for truth, spanning continents and generations.

'A young Australian man arrives in riot-ravaged Paris, armed with an ancient manuscript written in French and an obsessive desire to piece together the fragments of a mystery that has haunted him since childhood. His journey takes him back and forth in time, over the ruins of desert and city, and through the wrecks and mirages of history and memory.' (Publisher's blurb)