A sequel to the recently published The Empress Letters, this is an essential follow-up volume. Based on the musical term meaning ‘stolen time,’ Tempo Rubato is a concerto of passion that moves between past and present, Western and Eastern culture, exploring the meaning of identity and love. Continuing the saga of the Von Stronheim family of Victoria, BC, this second novel of a trilogy by Linda Rogers, centres on Precious Von Stronheim, daughter of the main character of the previous volume The Empress Letters. A renowned cellist in the touring Oak Bay Quartet, we meet Precious after years abroad, settled again in the waterfront mansion where she was raised. Now living with her violinist husband, Heath, and their deaf daughter Lily, Precious realizes she is pregnant with a second child. Worried that the birth of this child could spell the end of her family and the world she loves, Precious wonders if the baby will reveal the hidden origins she has kept secret and if her marriage can survive that deception. Precious questions whether this pregnancy will atone for past tragedies or continue the curse she believe afflicts her family. Like an intricate oriental brocade, Tempo Rubato weaves strands of culture and personal history into a fascinating celebration of music, identity and love. Caught in the echoes of past loss and the plaintive melodies of the East, Precious at last comes to terms with the present moment and the enduring nature of love.

Linda Rogers is a poet passionately engaged with existence whose poems resonate a subterranean logic and the music of deep mindfulness. In Homing: New & Selected Poems she returns again and again to the unquiet ground of the theatre of life. A singular and uncompromising awareness of suffering and joy, hope and despair, the arc of naked dreams and the sense of community, informs her three decades of writing and numerous published collections. In Homing Rogers has included representative poems from previous volumes –– social poems, introspective poems, both thoughtful and exuberant –– as well as new work. The sequence is consistent and steadfast like a slow-moving train of perception through the world of time. Linda Roger’s poems sing with a compassion and concern for social justice that elevates the spirit and massages the mind. Homing is a delicate and deliberate portrait of one poet’s chronicle of residence on planet earth.

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