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The Biographer cover art

The Biographer

By: Virginia Duigan
Narrated by: Julie Nihill
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Editor reviews

In a calm, smooth Australian accent, actress Julie Nihill takes the listener straight into a diary entry recording a meeting with a man "on the right side of unique". Soon, Nihill will flip the lights and reveal the larger scene: a hilltop community in Italy where Greer Gordon, expat, lives with her lover, a Czech artist named Mischa Svoboda, a man for whom she severed all her contacts - including her husband - 25 years ago.

Virginia Duigan specializes in novels written in the minor key, complete with lush details, remote settings, and mysterious human hearts. Thankfully, she strings the listener along with plot twists. Performer Nihill does a serviceable job, though non-Aussie accents are not her specialty.

Summary

A forthright investigation of human frailty and emotion with a plot that keeps you in its thrall until the last word.

When Greer Gordon met Mischa Svoboda, a driven Czech-born refugee painter, he was unknown. His debut at the small art gallery where she worked created a sensation, and their explosive love affair caused Greer to abandon her husband and career and embark on a nomadic life with Mischa.

Twenty-five years later, Tony, a young art critic who is researching a biography of Mischa, arrives in the small Italian hilltop community where Greer and Mischa now live. Greer is consumed by anxiety, fearing the biographer may have unearthed the secret she had always intended to write out of her life story.

A gripping cat-and-mouse game plays out, and with it the growing suspicion that Tony may be manipulating a dramatic outcome on which to build his career. Beautifully narrated, Virginia Duigan's intimate and enthralling portrait of the relationship between an artist and his lover will have listeners examining how their own biographies might be written, for who amongst us truly has nothing to hide?

©2009 Virginia Duigan (P)2009 Bolinda Publishing

Critic reviews

"Her vocabulary is adroitly chosen, her sentences beautifully balanced, her minor characters vividy sketched." ( Australian Book Review)

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