Virtual Book Tour & Giveaway: Arabesque by MG da Mota

 ARABESQUE

by

M G da Mota

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by

Goddess Fish Promotions.

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Historical Psychological Drama
Publisher: FlowingProse 
Publication Date: December 6, 2024
Page count: 391 pages

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SYNOPSIS:

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.

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ENJOY AN EXCERPT:

First Variation – Amadeus

Berlin, East Germany, July 1965

 

Amadeus gazes at his wife. Margarete or Grete, as is her preference, sleeps, exhausted from the effort of birth. Her hair appears glued to her forehead, wet from perspiration. Next to her, in a plain white hospital baby cot, their daughter is also asleep. He touches the little girl’s head gently. The baby, a small bundle inside the clothes too large for her, stirs marginally but does not wake. He arranges the cover around her slight body to keep her warm. She was born with hair, if one could call the blonde fluff hair. His chest swells. He already loves that little person with all the force of his being. Swallowing a couple of emotional tears he realises he will do anything, anything, to protect her. He wants her to grow up in peace, in freedom, to be able to make her own choices. With a heavy heart he wonders whether such wishes will ever be possible in this German Democratic Republic where democratic is a word devoid of meaning.

 

East Germany may be a lot of things but democratic is not one of them. Will he be able to adequately protect this tiny being and give her all she deserves? His chest tightens. He may have to shelter her from her own mother. Feeling shivers down his spine he recalls how his fears, his suspicions were confirmed a few months earlier, just after Grete told him she was pregnant.

ABOUT 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.

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Review Tour & Giveaway: Anastasia's Midnight Song by M. Laszlo

ANASTASIA'S MIDNIGHT SONG

by

M. Laszlo

This post is part of a virtual book tour organized by

Goddess Fish Promotions.

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Psychological drama

Publication Date: November 10, 2024

Page count: 343 pages

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SYNOPSIS:

Longing to cure her deep, hysterical fears involving a diabolical dream fox living inside her womb, Anastasia T. Grace takes a post making occult mirrors in the hope that she may someday convince herself that she commands the power to banish her nemesis into one of her creations. However, when a troubled, young Englishman grows obsessed with her beauty, she is forced to confront the pressing, all-too-real, misogynistic danger of male psychopathy.

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ENJOY AN EXCERPT:

Saint Petersburg, Russia. 27 August, 1917.

 

At dusk, Anastasia T. Grace collected the urn containing her mother’s ashes and brought the vessel to Moskovsky Prospekt Railway Station. ‘The cremation services went well,’ Anastasia whispered, holding the urn close. ‘You’ve been purified by fire, and now I’m taking you to be blessed by water. Baptised. Yes, Mama, I’ll sprinkle your remains all about the Arkhangelsk shore.’

 

A memory of their first journey to the White Sea whirled Anastasia back to the past—that time her mother had described Arkhangelsk as a harbour town. And in the days of 1907, that was all it was.

 

So, why did we travel there? A lady from the House of Fabergé asked Mama to meet a steamship out of Reykjavík. Yes, Mama aimed to collect a consignment of volcanic glass.

 

The hissing and shunting of the train brought her back to the present. It’s 1917. Clutching the urn containing Mother’s ashes, she pulled herself up into the train. Then she edged along the narrow passage and slid into the sleeping car. She placed the urn beside the bed.

 

With a rumbling of the wheels and a piercing whistle, the train set off on the long journey to Arkhangelsk.

 

Late in the night, as the train approached a deserted outpost and clanked over a section of the line lacking proper railway ties, Anastasia jerked awake. Sitting up, she looked to her lap and revisited that first journey, a decade ago, that moment the engineer had jammed on the brake and she’d been shaken awake as she had just now. What happened that night?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

M. Laszlo is the pseudonym of a reclusive author living in Bath, Ohio. According to rumor, he based the pen name on the name of the Paul Henreid character in Casablanca, Victor Laszlo.

 

M. Laszlo has lived and worked all over the world, and he has kept exhaustive journals and idea books corresponding to each location and post.

 

It is said that the maniacal habit began in childhood during summer vacations—when his family began renting out Robert Lowell’s family home in Castine, Maine.

 

The habit continued into the 1990s when he lived in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem and worked as a night clerk in a Palestinian youth hostel. In recent years, he revisited that very journal/idea book and based Anastasia’s Midnight Song on the characters, topics, and themes contained within the writings.

 

M. Laszlo has lived and worked in New York City, East Jerusalem, and several other cities around the world. While living in the Middle East, he worked for Harvard University’s Semitic Museum. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio and an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York.

REVIEW:

4 stars!

An atmospheric and complicated tale of madness set at the time of WWI. 

Anastasia’s Midnight Song by M. Laszlo is not a comfortable, easy book to read, yet it is riveting all the same. Told from the perspectives of the two main characters, Anastasia and Jack, I was mesmerized by what they were going through and kept off-balance by the fluidity of reality and fantasy. I turned the pages, hoping they each would find their way to peace and freedom from their hallucinations and depressions, but was unsettled by their ensuing descent further into their madnesses. 

The story’s settings are unusual, and the events of the time contribute to the characters’ problems. The author’s descriptions of 1917 St. Petersburg and the Sinai create a palpably heavy atmosphere that I felt I was constantly wading through alongside the characters. 

As the story unfolded, reality and Anastasia’s hallucinatory interactions with the arctic fox and Svetlana often merged, and I was uncertain what she was really experiencing, if there was still some reality at work. I also felt Jack’s fear of going to war was well-founded. His childhood ill-prepared him both mentally and physically for life in general; he was delusional as to his skills and future already, and a wartime posting would have been certain death, especially considering the transition the mechanics of war were undergoing during WWI. Still, his cowardice and inability to join in the conflict preyed on his mind with tragic results. 

With its character-driven plot and atmospheric imagery, I recommend ANASTASIA’S MIDNIGHT SONG to readers of literary fiction.

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