Due out on 1 June: Virginia Burdon's
first book, 'Stalker - A Wall of Silence'. A complex and gripping story of obsessive love and unrequited passion.
Associate Professor Geoffrey Eathorne writes: Virginia Burdon's debut shows a major talent too long concealed. STALKER is richly satisfying. It works on different levels from a detective story of sorts to an intense psychological study of absorbing interest. I have taught literature at a university level for many years but never have I read a first work which has given me such a jolt. ...it is startlingly original. READ IT is my advice.
New Zealander Virginia Burdon's first novel is a complex mix of memoir, fact and fiction, inspired by an encounter from her schooldays with a piano teacher who was fixated on the British composer Benjamin Britten.
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Years later she learns about a woman who invaded a performance of Britten's opera, 'The Turn of the Screw', at the eighth Alddburgh Festival, and wonders whether this woman and her teacher were one and the same person.
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When Virginia's quest to establish the truth is frustrated by a wall of silence she sets out to create an aternative story - one that ultimately leads to the woman's recovery and redemption.
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Virginia has mined her own schooldays and history to constuct a gripping psychodrama involving stalking, obsession, and unrequitedlove, set against a series of picaresque encounters that vividly evoke the period.
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