Straight Browsing from the Library: Arabesque by M G da Mota

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READ THE BLURB

A woman living alone in a coastal Sussex town in 1998 plants a copper beech sapling at 3 a.m. on a dark, cold night. Why?

A ballet dancer in 1960s East Germany is oppressed, longs for escaping with his little daughter but not his wife. Why? Will he make it?

In 2022 Karsten von Stein, widower and principal of the Royal Ballet, with two young children, meets Ivone Benjamim, a Portuguese, newly-arrived principal dancer. They discover a magical chemistry when dancing and soon it transfers to their private lives

Against the background of ballet and its dancers, a woman called Grace tells her story from a rehab centre. Obsessive, delusional she begins believing Ivone robbed her of the man of her dreams—Karsten. And then a skeleton is found in a garden...What connects all these people and their stories?

You’ll be the audience facing the stage of this balletic novel.

READ AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT To her left, separate from hers by a small stretch of land with a handful of allotments, six detached and four terraced houses form a row on the poorly lit street. The last few already on the slope. The street has thirteen houses on her side, the highest side. People say it’s unlucky. They mean the number 13 is unlucky. A bad omen. She laughs silently. What a whole lot of bull! Besides, there are another eight houses on the lower side facing hers, making twenty-one in total, so the silly superstition makes even less sense.

With an empty place on one side and the allotments on the other, her house is fairly isolated. Should someone peer out of their first floor windows they will not glimpse a thing in her back garden. Not without the moon. The night is nearly pitch black and too cold; the temperature plummeted once the rain stopped. Nothing and no one moves. No light. The world appears deserted, enveloped in darkness and silence. Perfect.

She glances at the alarm clock again. Twenty five past three. Must get going. Without switching on the lights, with only her small torch, she walks slowly down the stairs and directly into the lounge, quietly sliding open the French doors. The tiny copper beech tree she bought lays ready. It is little more than fifty centimetres high, appears fragile and thin. But it will be fine. She knows it will. The difficult bit is what she has to do now. Before starting she hovers a moment by the doors, standing without moving a muscle for nearly half a minute. Listening. Listening. A distant owl hoots. A quiet bat brushes the top of her head. And then silence. She turns off her torch and waits for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light. A faint glow from the streetlights at the front of the house gives the shapes in the garden the appearance of spectres. It takes her a couple of minutes to see enough to complete the task.

MEET THE AUTHOR

M G da Mota is Margarida Mota-Bull’s pen name for fiction. She is a Portuguese-British novelist with a love for classical music, ballet and opera. Under her real name she also writes reviews of live concerts, CDs, DVDs and books for two classical music magazines on the web: MusicWeb International and Seen and Heard International. She is a member of the UK Society of Authors, speaks four languages and lives in Sussex with her husband. Her website, called flowingprose.com, contains photos and information.

Website: https://www.flowingprose.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/m.g.da.mota
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mgdamota/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margarida-mota-bull

Amazon UK : https://www.amazon.co.uk/Arabesque-M-G-Mota-ebook/dp/B0D7CMSD5F/
Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Arabesque-M-G-Mota-ebook/dp/B0D7CMSD5F

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