Orpheus Lost (2007)according to publishers HarperCollins:
Achingly sensual, effortlessly lyrical, Janette Turner Hospital's dazzling Orpheus Lost is a powerful and disturbing novel.
It is a love story on a grand scale that spans America, Australia and the Middle East. It is also an exploration of the ghastly side effects of terrorism and of the nightmarish mistakes of war time from which the lovers must struggle to extricate themselves.
In the ancient myth, Orpheus travels to the underworld to rescue his lover Eurydice from death. In this compelling re-imagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of her lover. A mathematical genius, Leela has escaped her hardscrabble Southern hometown to study in Boston. There she encounters Mishka, a young Australian musician who soon becomes her lover. Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation centre. There has been an 'incident', an explosion on the underground; terrorists are suspected. Her interrogators reveal that Mishka may not be all he seems. But as she struggles to digest all this, Mishka disappears…
About Janette Turner Hospital (from her Web site):
Born in 1942, Janette Turner Hospital grew up on the steamy sub-tropical coast of Australia in the north-eastern state of Queensland. ... Her first novel, The Ivory Swing (set in the village in South India where she lived in l977) won Canada's $50,000 Seal Award in l982. ... The Last Magician, her fifth novel, was listed by Publishers' Weekly as one of the 12 best novels published in 1992 in the USA and was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'. Oyster, her sixth novel, was a finalist for Australia's Miles Franklin Prize Award and for Canada's Trillium Award, and in England it was listed in 'Best Books of the Year' by The Observer, which noted "Oyster is a tour de force… Turner Hospital is one of the best female novelists writing in English." In the USA, Oyster was a New York Times 'Notable Book of the Year'.... She holds an endowed chair as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and in 2003 received the Russell Research Award for Humanities and Social Sciences, conferred by the university for the most significant faculty contribution (research, publication, teaching and service) in a given year.
