Violin Lessons

A young boy plays the violin for his mother in Melbourne. Nina Simone sings 'Pirate Jenny' in a bar in Berlin. A fisherman plays a flute on the Mekong. And the strains of Paganini resonate in the forests of eastern Poland.

From the cabarets of 1940s Baghdad to the streets of war-torn Saigon and the canals and alleyways of present-day Venice, music weaves through each of these spellbinding true stories. They are tales of hardship, of yearning and of celebration. Tales that span the globe, and bring us back to Melbourne and the extraordinary story of Amal.

Her flight from Iraq, her fears boarding the unseaworthy boat Australians would come to know as SIEV X, her night spent clinging to a corpse alone in the sea, and her desire to have her story told. 'Maybe this is why I am alive,' Amal says, 'to tell the story of the people who sank in the ocean.'

Violin Lessons by Arnold Zable captures these moments with haunting prose, exploring the power of music and stories to transcend boundaries and bring light to the darkest of times.