Alice Nelson, author of 'The Pearl Divers'

What song would the narrator/protagonist of your story sing at a karaoke bar and why?

Karaoke – both the concept and the necessary joyousness to carry it off – is something far from the world of my characters, who inhabit an unspeakably troubled Broome in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If, however, I had to think of a piece of music that somehow evoked the feeling of ‘The Pearl Divers’ it would be Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor. The opening fugue, where each violin seems to answer the other, the sublime largo with its ineffable tenderness and enormous sadness and the complexity of the final allegro all seem to speak somehow of the story I was trying to tell.