Stephanie Johnson

Music From A Distant Room
ISBN: 1869416171
EAN/ISBN-9781869416171
Imprint: Random House NZ Vintage
Release: 04-06-2004

A fortnight after jazz pianist Carl Tyler's funeral, Tamara has one week to go before she leaves New Zealand to return to her native Chicago. Nola wants to solve the mystery of her son's death, to know everything Tamara can tell her, so she begins to tell Carl's lover about the time surrounding her son's conception, his childhood and his early love of music, in the hope that Tamara will remember. Nola is a dental nurse in the 1960s, living with her colourful mother Peg.

Her life revolves around her spotless dental clinic at the local school, the 'murder house' the kids call it. She doesn't know it, but by taking an interest in young Brett's bruises, and meeting his father Bernie, her life will be changed for ever. Forty years later, Nola has long since left dentistry behind. She reads palms now, fortune-telling. At the funeral of her son Carl, Nola tells Tamara, Carl's blind American girlfriend, about that time long ago, when she first met Bernie and her son was conceived. The son who was blind also but with a love for music that surpassed sight and gave him a vision uniquely his own.

Reviews of Music From A Distant Room

Slowly, inexorably, with deft touches she subtly builds up her canvas of fictional lives so that texture, colour and detail merge into a solid, satisfying whole. Always there is the writing, which is sensuous and strong with a superb clarity and freshness. Her intense evoking of Auckland, from its dreary suburban streets to the swampy inlets of the Manukau Harbour, results in a sense of both familiarity and strangeness. We finish the novel feeling that people and their stories matter, and yes, we do find out how Carl died. From inside their skin, ordinary lives possess grandeur and a quiet imaginative power. Johnson’s extraordinary talent is to capture this.
(Susan Jacobs in Canvas magazine, New Zealand Herald, June 5-6, 2004)

Immensely satisfying, utterly believable, Music From A Distant Room is Stephanie Johnson in top form. She has written the year to date’s best New Zealand novel.
(Warwick Roger in North and South, July 2004)

Like an Andre Dubus short story or an Atom Egoyan movie, the plot proceeds unflinchingly towards worst-case scenarios. Children are killed, lovers are separated, people are hurt, lives are ruined. But Johnson’s mordant wit prevents it from being an unrelieved gloom-fest… The book wouldn’t work if it was all just a black-hearted joke. We need to care what happens to the characters – and we do. Some scenes are touching; others devastating. There’s wisdom in the mix too. So much human energy goes into apportioning blame for mistakes and accidents. But, as this novel shows, self-crucifying guilt and vengeful rage just make matters worse.
(Iain Sharp, Sunday Star Times, May 30, 2004)