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.
We didn’t take him seriously. It turned out we should have. One fine day he packed his bags and told Mum he was leaving to never return. And what about the children, Mum asked, to which he replied, What about them? They’re your children, Laura. I never wanted them. Deal with it. With these words he disappeared from our lives and we never saw him again. While this was taking place my brother and I were at school. When we arrived home we found Mum in the kitchen crying. She explained what had happened. At first Ryan and I were confused. Dad had never been a caring person and paid little attention to his kids but he was around…occasionally. Most evenings he’d go out with friends to the pub and at weekends they’d travel around the country, supporting some football team whose name I have forgotten. But he had dinner at home, participating in the conversation though mostly by monosyllables or the odd disinterested question about how the two of us were doing at school.
After Dad left Ryan and I tried to help Mum around the house as much as we could. At the end of the first week she pulled herself together. At least superficially. She didn’t know where Dad had gone. She never blamed us directly for his departure but it was obvious, especially to me, she held us responsible. After all, he’d said as much. Anyway, Mum tried to put on a brave face. She suspected he’d left the UK with some floozy to try his luck elsewhere. And she was right. Years later when Ryan was twenty, finishing his apprenticeship as a car mechanic, and I was sixteen, through a friend of Mum’s we discovered that Dad was living in Southern Spain, Benidorm, where he ran a bar and nightclub.
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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Hello, I'm M G da Mota, author of Arabesque. Thank you for featuring my book today.
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