We are delighted to welcome Harriet Constable here to Hatchards for an evening in celebration of The Instrumentalist, her glorious new novel set in early 18th-century Venice.
In this city of glittering splendour, desperation and destitution are never far away. At the Ospedale della Pietà, abandoned orphan girls are posted every through a tiny gap in the wall every day.
Eight-year-old Anna Maria is just one of the three hundred girls growing up within the Pietà's walls – but she already knows she is different. Obsessive and gifted, she is on a mission to become Venice’s greatest violinist and composer, and in her remarkable world of colour and sound, it seems like nothing with stop her.
From the jewelled palaces of Venice to its mud-licked canals, this is a story of one woman’s irrepressible ambition and rise to the top, of loss and triumph, and of who we choose to remember and leave behind on the path to success.
Harriet will be in conversation with Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Girl of Ink and Stars and, most recently, The Storm and the Sea Hawk.
