Publisher's Synopsis
The fading Lila Du Cann returns to Burnhead to bury her father and remembers the summer of 1960. Aged 15, she was drawn away from the patchy sunshine of the town's summer season and deep into Uncle George's preposterous production of Puccini's Turandot - the opera of the moon, of passion, sacrifice and death - when she first sang and fell in love. Self-absorbed, caught between illusion and truth, innocence and knowledge, she barely noticed the production for the lunacy it was. As she revisits the melancholy and delusion that summer, Lila's grasp of the present loosens. Once more adrift in a twilight between opera and life, she wonders why the lover turns destroyer.
