The Place of Honeymoons

Edward Courtlandt has circled the globe and returned with nothing but weariness. Years of adventure have left him wealthy in experience but impoverished in purpose, a man haunted by the ghost of everything he might have been. Then he hears her voice. Eleonora da Toscana, the prima donna, sings from the stage of a grand opera house, and something dormant stirs in Courtlandt's chest. What begins as admiration curdles into obsession, and what starts as a pursuit of the elusive diva becomes something more dangerous: a desperate grasp at meaning in a world that has grown impossibly hollow. MacGrath crafts a tale of romantic longing set against the glittering, treacherous world of early twentieth-century opera, where ambition and artistry collide with desire and the terrible fear that one's best days lie already behind them. The novel pulses with the particular anguish of a generation that had seen too much and felt too deeply, men and women who understood that passion, once spent, cannot be reclaimed.