Motherless Child is the kind of novel that requires an early commitment from readers. Since the plot relies so heavily on dredging up the past, there’s a lot of set-up involved: seemingly disconnected details of a ghostly mother, someone who abandoned her family for a lover and possibly paid the price with her early death; a drowned brother; a troubled father and a widowed aunt who tried to keep together what was left of the family.

Elizabeth Guaragna leaves Toronto for New York and takes a job as the assistant to Alfred Rossiter, a famed music impresario. She assumes the name Lisa Sullivan, so he won’t discover that she is the daughter of Dominic Guaragna, the great pianist whose career Rossiter destroyed and whose wife he stole. Elizabeth’s stated motive in working her way into Rossiter’s life is to learn the true nature of the man who has been cast as the villain in her family’s tragedy, someone she was raised to despise. But this doesn’t feel sufficiently credible, at least in the novel’s early stages. At times, the reader wants to shake her, reprimand her for what feels like self-destructive behaviour and an unhealthy obsession with the past, and tell her to get on with her own life. Reading on, however, one gets wrapped up in the ruse Elizabeth has woven, and becomes as determined as she is to learn the truth. 

In addition to her work as an author and journalist, Marianne Langner Zeitlin has managed an orchestra and is married to a concert violinist. Details of the world of classical music interspersed throughout the novel add a wonderful layer of realism to what is at times a fairly interior narrative. Without giving away its unexpected twists and surprises, the ultimate message of Motherless Child is that the truth is never absolute, and all we know of it is what we’ve been led to believe.