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  • Published: 3 October 2014
  • ISBN: 9781775530299
  • Imprint: RHNZ Adult ebooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

Songs from the Violet Cafe



A 'wonderfully evocative novel' - Next

Acclaimed by critics as 'beautifully written', 'innovative' and 'profoundly moving', this novel is about the ways we are influenced in early life and can connect to others through shared experience.

A woman rows across a lake with a small part-Asian child. The woman is Violet Trench, who in future years will run the Violet Café with an iron will. Those who work in her café come from a diverse range of backgrounds, but each with their own troubles and each affected by working for this enigmatic woman. Her influence takes Jessie Sandal on dangerous journeys to the Far East, and to another stretch of water to be crossed with a small part-Asian child.

Although the characters go their separate ways, they never forget the flavour of that summer working at the café, like the secret, surprising allure of the truffle that infused the food there.

  • Published: 3 October 2014
  • ISBN: 9781775530299
  • Imprint: RHNZ Adult ebooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 272

About the author

Fiona Kidman

Fiona Kidman has published over 30 books, including novels, poetry, non-fiction and a play. She has worked as a librarian, radio producer and critic, and as a scriptwriter for radio, television and film. The New Zealand Listener wrote: ‘In her craft and her storytelling and in her compassionate gutsy tough expression of female experience, she is the best we have.’

She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships; in more recent years, The Captive Wife was runner-up for the Deutz Medal for Fiction and was joint-winner of the Readers’ Choice Award in the 2006 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and her short story collection The Trouble with Fire was shortlisted for both the NZ Post Book Awards and the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. Her novel This Mortal Boy won the 2019 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize, the NZ Booklovers Award, the NZSA Heritage Book Award for Fiction and the Ngaio Marsh Crime Writing Award for Best Novel.

She was created a Dame (DNZM) in 1998 in recognition of her contribution to literature, and more recently a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour. ‘We cannot talk about writing in New Zealand without acknowledging her,’ wrote New Zealand Books. ‘Kidman’s accessible prose and the way she shows (mainly) women grappling to escape from restricting social pressures has guaranteed her a permanent place in our fiction.’

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Praise for Songs from the Violet Cafe

Kidman, a poet, is a beautiful writer

The Times

Fiona Kidman has written a subtle, intensely wrought novel of echoes and shadows falling across decades and continents. The interwoven lives emerge and disappear with the abrupt clarity of memory. Stark and unsentimental in its acceptance of dependence, warm and haunting about lives never quite -but almost-reclaimed.

Janet Todd, author of A Man of Genius

Readers are in good hands; like all Kidman's writing, it is engaging and captivating.

The Lady