SYNOPSIS (Reviews)

Songs from the Violet Café is in print by VIntage.

What the critics say about Songs from the Violet Café:

"The novel sweeps across half a century and travels around the world and back again. It is a work of vision and maturity that tells a compelling story with a lightness of touch and a delight in the sensuous things of life -food, clothes, sex - that help the reader to assimilate its larger, more sombre purpose." Weekend Herald

"'Songs from the Violet Cafe is a fine book beautifully written. From the
"uneasy earth" of Rotorua to the "immense bright terrifying landscape" of
Cambodia, the novel's settings are vivid and adroit. It contains much
potential sensation - domestic violence, illicit sexual connections, deaths
and disappearances, and the desolation and venality of a country at war -
but there's also a wry humour, every intense emotion and extreme event
filitered through Kidman's cool precise prose." Dominion Post.

"Fiona Kidman is a novelist writing at the peak of her powers....The ease
with which Kidman weaves together the different characters and locations of
her story would be sufficient to set this novel apart, but it is her
depiction of the larger shadows hanging over her characters' lives that
gives this novel its real billiance." Canvas, NZ Herald