Suzanne Leal

And I think when you come to a book like this, which is so careful and so quiet, you need to read every word and you need to read slowly.

So I think the setup was successful from that perspective.

I found myself a

I like it when they met.

I mean, I like the contrast between Pearl and Axel and the emotion.

But I think the structure of the book as a whole is very clever.

And as Vicky was saying, it's a time of great upheaval in 1965.

And I hadn't quite seen it that way before.

I'd never thought of the opera house as having been half-constructed.

For me, it's always been a given and there.

And to imagine this as something that almost didn't occur or may not have occurred was fascinating.

Suzanne, I can see that you're thinking there.

But it's a grief-stricken book and I think it's what pervades the book for me and perhaps I come on the back of Chris Olsen's previous book, Boy Lost.

It's a book about loss and in the book everyone has lost someone or fears losing something and

So it's a non-fiction book and it's a book which is based upon Chris's older brother who was removed from her mother when he was a year old.

And it's the search for the brother and the grief of a family with a lost child.

So when I came to this book, which was the next book I've read of Christina's, it filled me with that same sense of grief that her earlier book had explored.

And I think to the forward of the book, the Marcel Proust quote is completely relevant to the rest of the book.

Do you want me to read that quickly?

I'm always impressed by people who come up with exactly the right quote for the right book at the right time.