Sandor's first book, a collection of short stories.

A Night of Music

Literature & Fiction

Sandor, Marjorie

United States

Ecco Press

It is April, 1555, and Juana I of Castile, the Spanish queen known as "la loca," has died after forty-seven years in forced seclusion at Tordesillas. Her last musician, Juan de Granada, refuses to depart with the other servants, forcing two functionaries of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to interrogate him in the now-empty palace. But is it really empty? Or is there, as Holy Office suspects, a heretic hidden on the premises, a converso secretly practicing the forbidden rites of Judaism? Only Juan knows the answer, and his subversive tale is at once a ballad of lost love and a last gambit to save a life--and a rich cultural and spiritual tradition on the verge of erasure. "Radiant, passionate, deeply intelligent and intensely moving, this brilliant novel brings alive a place and time surprisingly resonant with our own. Love and music burn like a laser through these glorious pages." -Andrea Barrett "In The Secret Music of Tordesillas, the fabulously gifted Marjorie Sandor tells the absorbing story of a Jewish musician and his queen, both living precarious lives in the tumultuous world of the Spanish Inquisition. Sandor's lustrous prose resonates like the music she so eloquently describes and her characters are exquisitely complicated. Reading these gorgeous pages, I felt that I too had taken up residence in some castle full of dark corners." -Margot Livesey "An historical novel of striking imagination and lyricism, this sly tale of sixteenth-century Spain, with its secrets and masks involving the interrelationships of Catholics, Muslims and Jews, has an uncanny bearing on our own country's diversity tensions. It is a pleasure to have another of Marjorie Sandor's delicious fictions: she is writing at the top of her form." -Phillip Lopate "I found Marjorie Sandor's The Secret Music at Tordesillas irresistible, as appealing for its grand romantic adventure as it is for its clear-eyed exploration of culture, tradition, and identity. Its narrative-replete with hidden Jews, palace intrigue, a captive queen, a hopeless love-is rendered in a prose as intoxicating as the ancient music that informs it. This is history in the form of a haunting song." -Steve Stern

The Secret Music at Tordesillas

Literary

Hidden River

Through these essays emerges a portrait of a mother, scholar, fly fisher, and gardener living each role with furious passion.

The Night Gardener

Sanor, Marjorie

Lyons Pr

At a time in her life when she once thought a person should have been well settled in for the long haul, Sandor and her new beloved set out to being a new life together. They buy an old house on the border between the large university, which employs them both, and a small urban/student wilderness.” Sandor’s young daughter, Hannah, divides her time between her father and her mother’s new home. Almost immediately, Sandor’s partner, Tracy, undergoes sudden heart surgery. He survives, but as they marvel at the fragility of their new life together, they discover that a developer, the Archdiocese of Portland, is planning a multi-story student apartment complex just behind their small, nascent back garden, where a small cluster of Arts and Crafts cottages stands. The development threatens the newfound haven they hope to make for themselves and Sandor’s daughter. The Late Interiors tells the story of five seasons of change and renewal in a woman’s life, braiding entries from a garden journal with lyric meditations and full-blown essays on our eternaland contradictoryhunger for adventure and refuge. Making a life in art, finding domestic harmony in a new partnership, discovering how a neighborhood comes together to take on seemingly unbeatable developers, and learning how to move forward through hardship and fear to embrace life in its fullest are the enduring themes of this witty and beautifully crafted memoir.

The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction

Religion & Spirituality

Arcade

Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories

"These beautiful stories freeze the sweep of the hands of the clock, they stop the beat of your heart, with the precision of their language and their generous emotion."—Frederick Busch
Linked stories follow a Jewish-American family across several generations. Clara comes from a restrained, secretive family lending the book a taut narrative tension. The big secret—her husband’s adultery during World War II—is not revealed until the last story. Sandor’s prose is quiet, moving, psychologically acute.
Marjorie Sandor is the author of The Night Gardener (Lyons) and A Night of Music (Ecco). Her fiction has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize XIII, and The Best of Beacon. She teaches at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Sarabande Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sandor, Marjorie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sandor, Marjorie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sandor, Marjorie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Night of Music

The Secret Music at Tordesillas

The Night Gardener

The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction

Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories

Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories