The Keeper of Secrets by Julie Thomas
Auckland-born
Julie Thomas originally self-published The Keeper of Secrets as an ebook
then, after selling over 40,000 copies and receiving over sixty five-star
reviews, she received an email from the senior vice president and editor at
HarperCollins US in New York — they loved her book and wanted to publish it
worldwide.
The idea for The Keeper of
Secrets came when Julie was researching a film script on Jewish art looted
by the Nazis in WW2 and she came upon the subject of looted musical
instruments. The more she read about it, and discovered that thousands of
musical instruments were looted and that they're far harder than paintings to
trace and establish provenance, the more fascinated she became.
She then
found a magazine article about a genuine Guarneri del Gesù violin that was
looted from a Jewish family in Berlin in 1939 and is now believed to be
destroyed. One of the most precious musical instruments ever made and one of
only thirteen created in 1742, lost. So Julie invented the story of what happened
to it.
The
Keeper of Secrets
took Julie seven years to write and involved comprehensive research of the
Holocaust, Stalinist Russia, and stolen treasures, as well as listening to 200
pieces of violin music.
Spanning
seventy years from pre-war Berlin, through Dachau to Soviet Russia to modern
day America, the novel features many historical figures, violinists,
politicians and army generals. All the discussions in The Keeper of
Secrets are factual, and all the violins and stories mentioned are real.
Berlin,
1939. Fourteen-year-old Simon Horowitz is awash in a world of music. His family
owns a superb collection of instruments and at its heart is his father’s 1742
Guarneri del Gesù violin. But all is lost when the Nazis march across Europe,
the Horowitz family’s possessions are confiscated, and Simon and his father and
brother are sent to Dachau. Amid unimaginable cruelty and death, Simon finds
kindness from an unexpected corner, and a chance to pick up a violin in
exchange for a chance to live.
In the
present day, orchestra conductor Rafael Gomez finds himself inspired by Daniel
Horowitz, a fourteen-year-old violin virtuoso who refuses to play. When Rafael
learns that the boy’s family once owned a precious violin believed to have been
lost forever, Rafael seizes the power of history and discovers a family story
like no other.
Julie
Thomas was born with congenital heart defects, and any physical exertion made
her turn blue, so she spent the first four years of her life in bed where her
mother read to her and taught her to read. By age five she was a voracious
reader and by the age of eight she had the comprehension and reading ability of
a seventeen-year-old.
At age four
Julie had pioneering corrective open heart surgery and she is one of the oldest
surviving pediatric cardiac patients in New Zealand. Julie has worked in
the media in New Zealand and the UK for over twenty years, in television, film
and radio including Radio Sport, Radio New Zealand, TVNZ and Sky Sport. She
'semi-retired' to Cambridge in 2011 to write fulltime and is working on her
second novel, optioned by HarperCollins, that stretches from Italy to New
Zealand and WW2 to the present day.
The Keeper of Secrets RRP $24.99, Release Date
21 June
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