Dead People's Music – blurb

Classical is karaoke – playing covers of dead people’s music – or so Wellingtonian Rebecca concluded at her London conservatorium. She’s sabotaged her scholarship there, but wants to keep playing the cello, like her grandmother, Klara. Now unmoored from her classical training, she’s in New York City, where Klara grew up. As Rebecca investigates her Jewish-refugee heritage, she starts to compose her own songs, but has to contend with diabetes and other burning issues: is she with the right man, or should she swap stability for lust? And how much longer can she live with a neurotic, junk-scavenging flatmate, on the verge of murdering another zebra fish?

Born in 1973, Sarah Laing grew up in Palmerston North, went to Victoria University in Wellington, and worked as a graphic designer in Manhattan. She now lives in Auckland with her husband and two children. Her first book was a collection of short stories, ‘Coming Up Roses,’ and she won the Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition in 2006. In 2008, she was a writer in residence at the Michael King Writers Centre.

Listen to Sarah talking about the book.