Colin Sargent is the founding editor and publisher of the award-winning Portland Magazine in Maine, USA. Colin teaches Creative Writing at William & Mary in Williamsburg and is the author of Museum of Human Beings and The Boston Castrato, currently optioned for film by Gideon Films. He has a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University and has also written 3 collections of poetry. Colin edited Approach Magazine, the US Navy's international flying magazine, whose contributors included Tom Wolfe.

A modern classic in the making.

This book does for 1920s Boston what E.L. Doctorow did for New York in Ragtime: it grabs a city out of history and makes it vivid. Be it the high style of the Parker House Hotel; the flagrant, fragrant set who dance attendance on the poet Amy Lowell; the scientists and shipbuilders and politicians and utter rogues who raise the city from the dirt; it all shimmers into reality as an outsider leads us is into its quaking heart. Raffi, a young Italian, is our guide. He left more than his country behind in Rome. Snipped by a bishop as the last castrato, he is bundled off to America when the Church takes shame. Forbidden to use his voice, other skills steal him into the society of 1920s Boston. Raffi enters the hardest quest of all the search for a genuine love song.