The Sound of Turquoise - Softcover

Gill Gregory

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1899999469 ISBN 13: 9781899999460

Publisher: Kingston University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Meg begins to make sense of her history when she reads an account of her Russian grandfather's childhood. Fourteen year old Alexis's life is devastated when gunmen execute his parents and siblings on their estate in Tashkent, from which he flees by train in 1904. She is entranced by his story, which includes a friendship with Benjamin Britten and a tale attached to Constable s painting, Chain Pier, Brighton. When Meg begins to write later in her life, her warm, spirited voice tells a story which will resonate with anyone who has felt strangely alone within their own family. Spanning the 20th century The Sound of Turquoise challenges our perceptions of love and loss. This is a remarkable work of life writing that leads us to explore our ancestry in order to understand the ways in which the past continues to haunt and shape our lives in the present.

About this title

Review

This subtle, beautifully written narrative is irresistible. Built from stories within stories, memories within memories, it tells of a girl growing up in the sixties haunted by the three men in her family her brother who has severe epilepsy, her mysterious psychiatrist father and her exotic Russian grandfather. The tenderness and the bleakness, the jokes and the tragic tensions evoked in Gill Gregory's book are unforgettable. She is a fine writer with a gripping story to tell. --Isobel Armstrong

A gentle, lyrical life history in which Gregory creates a space for her alter ego, 'Meg', to relive her experiences: some exhilarating, some too painful perhaps to recall directly. From ballet in Bloomsbury to Croydon's Orchid Ballroom, packed with eager teenagers waiting to see The Supremes, Gregory's narrative offers vivid sketches of venues and a strong sense of the bodily presence of those who frequented them. Preoccupied with the epilepsy of her brother, we watch Meg as she haunts the periphery [...] The Sound of Turquoise also recounts Meg's Russian grandfather's fairy-tale escape from 'exotic' Uzbekistan in 1904 but it is the details of the adoptive world he rallied round him in England that will perhaps most captivate the reader - the collection of Constable's landscapes paintings and his impassioned discussions with Benjamin Britten over their display at Aldeburgh. --The Times Literary Supplement

'A powerful and haunting tale of migration which maps and explores the ways in which trauma continues to resonate through the generations. As a child of migrants from Poland and Croatia, The Sound of Turquoise resonated for me on many levels. The Sound of Turquoise is a beautiful and very dramatic story of the past told from the vantage point of the present. Here is a compelling tale of our times.' --Greg Kucich

From the Author

My book, The Sound of Turquoise, won the Kingston University Press competition for Biography & Memoir (2008) which was judged by Kathryn Hughes, Rachel Cusk and Hanif Kureishi. Winning the competition came as a big surprise and, with the encouragement of KUP, I then reworked the material as a third person narrative.

The Sound of Turquoise was launched on December 1st at the London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury, where the early chapters of The Sound of Turquoise are set. The bookshop was packed, with my American students bringing a lot of energy and excitement to the evening.

The `turquoise' of the title refers to the domes of Central Asian mosques which my Russian grandfather, Alexis, leaves behind in his flight from Tashkent in 1904. I only met my grandfather once, at the age of nine, when my father and I visited him in his London flat. The memory is still very vivid - he was short and stocky and had a strong Russian accent. He laughed a lot and radiated a great deal of warmth.

The story of his flight to England (on his own) at the age of fourteen has always fascinated me and I began writing and researching his story a few years ago after going to a talk on Uzbekistan at my local Waterstones.

The other story in The Sound of Turquoise is that of my brother, Andrew, who suffered from a very severe form of epilepsy. I didn't want my book to read as a narrative primarily about illness, so the lives of Alexis and Andrew, the stories of an extremely resilient boy and of a very ill boy, are juxtaposed. Meg (who is based on myself) has these two stories running in her imagination on parallel lines, with both containing moments of high drama and many surprises.

The girl on the cover of The Sound of Turquoise is myself, aged about nine. The bandstand beside her is based on the Clapham Common bandstand but also nods to the Central Asian domes. I am holding a live monkey (the pic was taken outside Hampton Court in the early sixties)!

Edition details

• Publisher: Kingston University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1899999469
• ISBN 13: 9781899999460
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 168