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Tenor of Love is a work of fiction about three women in love with one man, the great opera singer, Enrico Caruso. The resonance and textures of Caruso's voice are conveyed through a language filled with music. It is a story of passion, jealousy and betrayal, a story of art, ambition, and the shifting nature of identity.
The novel unfolds in two parts; it bridges two centuries and two continents. The first part is set in Italy in 1897 and is a tale of two sisters, Ada and Rina Giachetti, the sopranos whose rivalry for the tenor's love drives them to betray each other. Rina, at seventeen, falls obsessively in love with the then destitute and unknown singer. But it is her older sister, Ada, who changes Caruso's life both on the stage and in his heart. The color and drama of the operatic stage and its plots leech into their daily lives, and these relationships end in scandal and heartbreak. In the second part of the novel, the narrative moves across the Atlantic to America. It reopens in New York City in 1917. Caruso is now world famous and fabulously rich. He meets Dorothy Benjamin Park, a sensitive young American woman. This is the story of the three short years of their courtship and marriage.
These two stories and the two cultures, Italian and American, they represent, are connected through love and the language of music, embodied in the tenor, Enrico Caruso.
Tenor of Love was published in January 2005 by Penguin Canada and Simon and Schuster, Touchstone.
