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2. I love the night sky and can stand looking up at the stars for hours in a dark place, with little or no light, in the middle of nowhere.

3. People know me as a classical music, opera and ballet lover but I enjoy some rock music too. When I lived in Germany I went, among others, to the live concerts of Queen, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd and Gary Moore. The experiences were memorable.

4. I worked in IT for many years but before that I was a TV presenter, a translator and a teacher of foreign languages and history but always continued to write in parallel to these jobs during my spare time.

5. I kept my writing secret from most people, except my brother and best friend, for many years because I thought people would think I was weird.

6. I don’t like ice cream and I will always prefer cheese to cake or sweets, however, I love chocolate, especially dark chocolate and find it difficult to resist.

7. I don’t like tea. It is something I never drink. I find it just tastes like hot water though it can have nice aromas.

8. I like fast cars and motorbikes and I used to fly as a co-pilot fixed-wing small planes with a friend of mine in Germany a long time ago. When I moved to the UK I learned to fly helicopters.

9. The things I most hate in life are boredom and stupidity.

10. I lived in Germany ten years and while there I hitchhiked often and travelled all over the country in that way.

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.

Enjoy an Excerpt

Prologue
Southeast England, late November 1998

She looks out of the window. Dark night. Black but clear. Twinkling dots punctuate the raven velvet of the sky. Stars shimmer cold and icy. Their light slightly wavering. She knows it is the Earth’s atmosphere. But that’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t matter a jot. Not at this moment anyway.

Darkness is the important thing. No moon. New moon. Why do people refer to a new moon when there is no moon or when one cannot see the moon from our revolving, ever turning blue dot? The moon is still up there in the sky. It’s just that at some point during its orbit its farther side from us is facing the sun. So the side facing us is dark and we can’t see it. As simple as that.

Tonight is new moon. An ideal night. She opens the window quietly and glances at the houses to her right first, then to her left. Like hers they are all immersed in silent darkness. People sleep. She looks at the luminous hands of her alarm clock on the side table. The shorter hand points at the number three, or close to it, and the long hand at somewhere between ten and fifteen. Probably around 3:12 in the morning. Her house stands almost but not quite alone on top of the hill. To her right, looking from her bedroom window that faces the back garden, there are two houses. The one closest to hers is empty.

About the Author: 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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