Book 1 of The Gift
Historical Fiction
Date to be Published: November 5, 2025
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
But the violin Marthe’s father left her is a constant reminder of the profound bond between them, and it gives her the strength to begin healing. When the Köln Conservatory offers her an unexpected scholarship, she seizes her chance to reach for excellence.
Under the rigorous tutelage of Professorin Wolff, and subjected to predatory harassment by a fellow student determined to destroy both her self-worth and her chances of success, Marthe quickly learns she will need more than motivation and talent to rise to the top.
Filled with heart, wit, and music, The Well-Tempered Violinist is an enduring coming-of-age tale about an artist striving for greatness against enormous odds.
What is the hardest part of writing your books?
Have you ever been in a cave—not near the entrance—and turned your headlamp off? That is the darkest dark I’ve ever been in. A lot of writing this story felt like I was in that cave with only the very tiniest headlamp. I could only see a single step ahead, maybe enough to write the next line, or think of a possibility for where to go next.
I did have what one of my writing teachers call “islands”: things I thought would take place at particular points, and so I wrote those, and then, inching through the dark cave with my tiny headlamp, I tried to connect the islands. As often as not, what happened between islands changed the islands themselves, but that was fine. The main thing was to get there.
Another metaphor for the process is building up an oil painting with layer upon layer of thin, translucent paints to get to the final level of complexity and inner luminosity. Every layer adds something to the finished work.
Also, the logistics of a story of this magnitude are daunting.
The Gift quadrilogy includes a lot of characters, several families, and unfolds
over a substantial period of time. So, there’s an abundance of personal
histories and dates. I ended up making family trees. I made a spreadsheet so I
could keep track of what was happening to whom and when. It was all way too
much for my unassisted brain.
What are your most played songs?
This book is about music and musicians and their training. So, I didn’t have a favorite writing tune, but I listened to every piece of music I wrote about, often as I was writing about it. YouTube became my friend.
In addition to a glossary and a list of composers, there is
a complete list of musical compositions in the back of the book. My website
has, or will shortly have, a playlist of YouTube links for each of these
compositions, with additional comments. I encourage readers to listen to them.
They may find something they really like! At the very least they’ll hear what
Marthe was hearing, though with different ears.
Do you have critique partners or beta readers?
This project started out as a class assignment for my short
fiction class at Grossmont Community College (I know, right? How did short
turn into a quadrilogy??!) and then began its expansion into a novel a
few years later in a novel-writing class there. So, in classes, we workshopped.
That’s tough with a novel, though, because you’re only seeing a little snippet
of the work, without much context.
When I had what I thought was a really solid draft of the
whole quadrilogy (I was wrong), two friends who didn’t know what they were in
for agreed to be beta readers. One in particular I asked for help because
several of my characters are secular Jews, and her parents’ families were
Holocaust survivors. Her father escaped from Vienna as a child on the
Kindertransport to England. I’m not Jewish, and I wanted to be sure I had the
overall tone right. Her approval gave me a lot of confidence.
Curiously, my other friend also had Jewish ancestry—but he hadn’t known it until he was an adult. And he was less comfortable with the level of secularization and assimilation my characters embody. But my research indicated that German Jews in the early 20th century were the most highly assimilated in Europe. So, I took his comment seriously, but in the end I kept things largely as they were.
My third beta reader was my daughter. She was a demon for
missing punctuation, but otherwise I think she was pretty gentle, for better or
for worse.
What book are you reading now?
Something totally different! Mark Twain, The Innocents
Abroad, his breakout book from 1869. I love his dry wit, and also that he
is capable of being awed by things and expressing that, as well as being
underwhelmed by other things. He’s far more than a provincial jingoist. But
before that I just finished Ben Shattuck’s beautiful story collection The
History of Sound: paired stories connected over decades or centuries by
some event or object, in which it’s up to the reader to connect the dots and
figure out what has not been told. I love stories that contain clues to the
real story but don’t tell it.
How did you start your writing career?
When my younger child was graduating from high school in
2013, I was looking around for something new to learn. I decided against trying
to re-start piano lessons—45 years is too long to let an art practice go and
the frustration always defeated me. For the same reason I decided against
trying to re-learn drawing and painting. Also, that path leads to a real
inventory problem, namely a house full of unsatisfactory paintings that nobody
wants. I always enjoyed writing but had never studied it, so I signed up for
classes at my local community college, a great program, great teachers, and a
tremendous value. I would recommend community college to anyone. One class per
semester, and eight years later, I’d taken everything they had as many times as
I could. And then we had a pandemic. Writing gave me something to hold onto, a
reason to get up in the morning and a way to stay sane, one step at a time through
the dark cave with my tiny headlamp. I didn’t call it writing a book—too
intimidating. I called it playing with my imaginary friends and let people
think what they wanted. My last class had been novel-writing, and these
characters had wandered into my head and taken up residence there. They were
clearly not going anywhere until I had told their story, and possibly not even
then. I suspect I will have them with me always. It’s fine. They are really
interesting people to know, even if I did make them up.
Tell us about your next release.
Like I said, The Gift is a quadrilogy. So the next release
will be Book II, whose working title is No Path Through The Forest. It
is the story of the next phase of Marthe’s life, the turbulent second decade of
the twentieth century. Let’s just say it’s not an easy decade. I hope your
readers will enjoy Book I and be on pins and needles for Book II! And Books III
and IV after that, of course!
The Well-Tempered Violinist, Book 1 of The Gift series, is her first novel.
Contact Links
Facebook: Barbara Thornburgh Carlton, Writer
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