Liza Wieland – författare

A modest, quiet woman, Mara Raynor never dreamed she''d one day find herself in charge of the small private school in Washington, D.C., where for many years she taught music and choir. But after the unexpected death of her husband, the school''s headmaster, Mara finds herself thrust into the public eye, burdened not just with the responsibilities of acting headmaster---a role she never wanted---but also with a potentially explosive political and religious controversy that tests parents'' and school administrators'' spirit of tolerance.

When a Sikh student is caught wearing a ceremonial knife on school grounds, fear spreads among parents and the school board. Coming at the same moment as the disappearance of Mara''s teenage daughter, the controversy quickly assumes a far more personal nature. Not just any student, the Sikh boy is both the son of a woman with whom Mara shares a complicated past and---as Mara soon discovers---her own daughter''s boyfriend.

As it moves back and forth in time between the school in contemporary Washington and a girls'' boarding school in the British countryside in 1977, A Watch of Nightingales weaves a rich and textured exploration of fear and remorse, the mysteries of love, and the complicated tensions that ring down the generations from parent to child.

New Mexico, 1985. Brigid Long Night, a young half-Navajo painter, goes to work as an assistant for the elderly Georgia O’Keeffe. Haunted by the decision to give up her newborn daughter for adoption, Brigid struggles with the direction and inertia of her life. With O’Keeffe’s encouragement, Brigid develops a powerful style, incorporating language and wordplay as well as image in her portrayal of Native American life and her place in it.Atlanta, 1995. Nancy Diamond, an aspiring playwright, encounters Brigid’s work and begins to understand the hidden truths about her own life as the child born of an affair between her white mother and an African American artist. New York City, 2001. Sasha Hernandez enrolls at Columbia University to study filmmaking. She has only recently discovered that her mother, living in Manhattan, is a celebrated painter and sculptor whose work is installed in the sculpture garden at the World Trade Center.In Liza Wieland’s deeply moving novel, these interwoven stories show how art reveals the depth and complexity of human love, in all its betrayals and losses, beauty and redemption.