Mozart’s Blood is historical fiction based on a real-life character, the opera singer Teresa Saporiti, who created the role of Donna Anna in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. The story spans four centuries and takes place in half a dozen great opera houses. It’s all about an abiding passion for music which even time and death cannot extinguish.
Sing the Light, Sing the Warmth, and Receive the Gift comprise the trilogy of The Singers of Nevya, completed in 1997. A follow-up novel, Singer in the Snow, was published in 2004. These novels, unlike my other works, are science fantasy, which is to say they are soft science fiction with one fantastic element, in this case, the psi, or telepathic powers of the Singers who create warmth and light for their people. Nevya is an ice world, a planet under a binary star system (see, a little science sneaks in), where summer comes only once every five years, and the ground is frozen so that metal is impossible to obtain.
Louise Marley’s short stories reflect her varied life experience, from a girlhood on a Montana ranch to a career as a classical singer and teacher, to her successes as a writer of science fiction and fantasy. Known primarily as a novelist, Marley creates distinct worlds even in her short work. In this volume, readers will travel from post-World War II Montana to an nineteenth-century villa in Tuscany, to a space colony where women rebel against the draft, and to a concert hall in a near-future Seattle. Each story offers unforgettable characters, vivid settings, and something to think about.
Nevya is an “ice planet” without technology, so cold that to be outside after nightfall means certain death.The Nevyans rely on their Singers, who are trained to channel psi energy through music to create heat and light. Mreen is one of the most talented Singers at the Nevyan Conservatory—but she is unable to speak aloud. Her companion and interpreter when she is assigned to the community of Tarus is Emle, who, despite considerable training, has never been able to channel her psi. The two young women, so long sheltered by the Conservatory, face many challenges, including learning how to relate to each other. They then find out about young Gwin, whose abusive stepfather wants to exploit her psi-Gift talents—and in reaching out to help her, Mreen and Emle also help themselves.
A priest of the Order of Mary Magdalene and a skilled anthropologist, Isabel Burke has been called offworld to the barren planet of Virimund. The ExtraSolar Corporation, developing Virimund as an energy source, has encountered an ‘incident’ that has stopped their work. It seems there are people on Virimund after all–descendants of an emigrant ship that left Earth three hundred years before. And something has changed them.
In the final few years of the twenty-first century, life in Paris is quiet for Ebriel Serique and her family. They live protected by the glass walls of their skyscraper apartment, safe from the poverty-stricken inhabitants in countries on the other side of the Line of Partition. Talented, comfortable, and content, Ebriel never questions her life. Until one day, her husband and daughter go sailing, and are murdered by terrorists who claim their yacht had crossed the Line.
Eilish Eam is an orphan living in London, 1761. She stands on an icy corner and plays her instrument: water-filled glasses. Fingers raw from the cold, her only comfort is the place her music takes her . . . to visions of a young girl, much her own age, but with odd short hair. Eilish survives on pennies and applause, and nothing more. Until the night Benjamin Franklin stops to listen, awestruck by her gift–and with plans for her future . . .
Zahra IbSada is a talented medicant, and sees much of the joy in the lives of the women she heals–and much of the pain. She sees a wife brutally beaten, a prostitute suffering at the hands of her employers. And her best friend Kalen, a mother who is struggling to save her daughter from a cruel betrothal. Kalen begs Zahra for help, and although it goes against her medicant vows, Zahra reluctantly agrees. But this silent act of terrorism will have far-reaching consequences—for herself, and for all the women of her planet.
Driven by insane jealousy, Duke William is determined to found his own flying school, where the valuable flying horses of Oc will learn to bond with well-born young men—instead of arrogant women. Now, Larkyn Hamley and her beloved Black Seraph must gather all of their allies from the air to the ground. For if they do not soar now, none will ever see the skies again.
Larkyn Hamley, the free-spirited country girl who accidentally bonded with a winged horse, is in her second term at the Academy of the Air when the savage Aesks attack a northern village. The Duke refuses to respond, and Larkyn and her beloved teacher, Horsemistress Philippa Winter, find themselves in direct conflict with Duke William as chaos threatens the Duchy of Oc. Philippa’s career, and even Lark’s life, hang in the balance.
