The Sound of Blue
The Sound of Blue takes readers on an exquisite and soulful journey into a rare part of the world, exploring the healing power of music in the lives of three strangers during the last Balkan War. Sara Foster has left America for the adventure of a lifetime-teaching English to the elite of Hungary, but ends up teaching in a refugee camp instead and falling in love with one of her students, a celebrated synesthete composer.
When he mysteriously disappears from the camp, Sara finds herself crossing the border into his war-torn homeland, determined to return the musical masterpiece that he has left behind. In a perilous journey that takes her to Dubrovnik, a magnificent stone city on the Croatian Riviera, Sara meets Luka, a troubled drummer boy, who's captivated the town's attention and heart and who holds the secret to the composer's fate and her own. Bringing to life a world that readers seldom have the opportunity to see, The Sound of Blue reveals poignant truths about the quests for refuge we all pursue.
“The boy’s name was Luka and he wanted his drum. It was not an unreasonable request for a nine-year-old couped up in a bomb shelter for six weeks. He accidentally dropped the drum on the street the day he went underground with seven hundred people. They fled their homes and the Serbian soldiers burning them, determined to stay in Vukovar. It was mid-November. Nobody walked the streets now. Bridges were mined. Windows sandbagged. The street, his mother had admonished, was where the drum would stay.”
Chapter I, The Sound of Blue
“Payne employs flourishes of figurative language and poetic musings on the nature of refuge and memory.”
Booklist
“Holly Payne’s greatest achievement in “The Sound of Blue” is to move the story beyond the never-ending volleys of who-did-what-to-whom into a realm where the only thing that really matters is not whether her characters are Serb or Croat but that they are refugees.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Against a background of stark wartime imagery, Payne laces her tale with poetic musings on the healing and redemptive power of love.”
American Library Association
“Here is a courageous, compassionate new voice filled with elegant and assured prose. Payne is a masterful storyteller who proves again to tackle ambitious subject matter with great delicacy.”
Ishmael Reed, winner of the McCarthy Genius Award
“I feel like I know Luka as well as Payne does because I am a “Luka.” Like every character in Payne’s novel, I understand what it means to be a refugee, and how we are all survivors of the assembly of the hurts and slights that define us. Payne’s insightful and vividly detailed story reminds us of our common daily struggle to ensure our triumphs outpace our disappointments.”
David Breshears, Everest mountaineer, cinematographer, author of High Exposure
“The book’s heart matches its author’s – expansive and exploding with passion. Payne’s understanding of music, especially rhythm, rings true on every page.”
Liberty DeVitto, drummer of The NYC Hit Squad and formerly of Billy Joel
“With Holly’s intimate and poetic writing, book reader groups
can comfortably travel to the tension of unfamiliar places….”
Rachel Jacobsohn, Association of Book Group Readers
and Leaders and author of The Reading Group Handbook