Stabat Mater

At night, 16-year-old Cecilia haunts the corridors of the Venetian foundling hospital that is her home, writing letters that will never be sent to a mother she’ll never meet. By day she plays violin in the orphanage’s orchestra, hidden from sight of the republic’s worthies. Her knowledge of the exterior world is non-existent; on the rare occasions she is allowed out, she is masked and chaperoned. Only when a new maestro, Antonio Vivaldi, arrives does she escape her isolation.

Winner of Italy’s top fiction prize, the Strega, Stabat Mater explores the paradox that the most abstract of art forms, music, is also the most passionate. Too bad, then, that this passion isn’t reflected in the writing, a mix of earnest rhetorical flourishes and ill-digested Catholic iconography, voiced by a relentlessly intense narrator. The publisher neatly calls it “an avant-garde Girl with a Pearl Earring” but who wants that?

Stabat Mater, by Tiziano Scarpa, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Serpent’s Tale, RRP£9.99, 176 pages