A dazzling historical debut set in eighteenth-century Venice, about the woman written out of the story of history's greatest musical masterpiece
**An Observer Debut Novelist of 2024**
**Selected as a book of 2024 by the New Statesman and the BBC**
'Enthralling, passionate, vivid. The Instrumentalist is a marvel' Kiran Millwood Hargrave
'A fascinating story of music, ambition, and womanhood in eighteenth-century Venice' Charmaine Wilkerson
'I was swept away by this searing portrait of ambition and betrayal' Elizabeth Macneal
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I will be remembered. My life will mean something.
Venice. 1704. In this city of glittering splendour, desperation and destitution are never far away. At the Ospedale della Pietà, abandoned orphan girls are posted every day through a tiny gap in the wall.
Anna Maria is just one of the three hundred girls growing up within the Pietà's walls – but she already knows she is different. Obsessive and gifted, she is on a mission to become Venice’s greatest violinist and composer, and in her remarkable world of colour and sound, it seems like nothing will stop her.
But the odds are stacked against an orphan girl – so when the maestro selects her as his star pupil, Anna Maria knows she must do everything in her power to please this difficult, brilliant man. But as Anna Maria’s star rises, threatening to eclipse that of her mentor, the dream she has so single-mindedly pursued is thrown into peril…
From the jewelled palaces of Venice to its mud-licked canals, this is a story of one woman’s irrepressible ambition and rise to the top, of loss and triumph, and of who we choose to remember and those who lie forgotten.