A dazzling historical debut set in eighteenth-century Venice about the woman written out of
the story of one of history's greatest musical masterpieces 'Enthralling passionate vivid.
The Instrumentalist is a marvel' Kiran Millwood Hargrave 'I was swept away by this searing
portrait of ambition and betrayal' Elizabeth Macneal
_________________________________________________________ Venice. 1704. In this city of
glittering splendour desperation and destitution are never far away. At the Ospedale della
Pietà abandoned orphan girls are posted every through a tiny gap in the wall every day.
Eight-year-old Anna Maria is just one of the three hundred girls growing up within the Pietà's
walls - but she already knows she is different. Obsessive and gifted she is on a mission to
become Venice's greatest violinist and composer and in her remarkable world of colour and
sound it seems like nothing with stop her. But the odds are stacked against an orphan girl -
so when the maestro selects her as his star pupil Anna Maria knows she must do everything in
power to please this difficult brilliant man. But as Anna Maria's star rises threatening to
eclipse that of her mentor the dream she has so single-mindedly pursued is thrown into
peril... From the jewelled palaces of Venice to its mud-licked canals this is a story of one
woman's irrepressible ambition and rise to the top of loss and triumph and of who we choose
to remember and leave behind on the path to success.
