A woman carries a placard bearing the question "Are you content to be nothing?" as she conducts her way through the interconnected stories of this thought-provoking collection. A pianist herself, eventually she'll be the soloist in her own story, but first we'll encounter the contrapuntal lines of "Café Society", the discord of "The Companion's Tale", the slowly evolving dark harmonic resolution of "Aquarium".

These are the songs of people — many of them seniors — sidelined and dismissed, but refusing to go gently into that good night — a night that isn't even on their concert program! Be it through a percussive storm of revelation, or a quietly insistent ostinato that won't be ignored, this is an orchestra of characters never content to be nothing, determined to be heard.

Rachel Wyatt is a prolific and award-winning author of novels, short fiction, stage and radio plays and non-fiction works. Her six novels include The Rosedale Hoax, Foreign Bodies, and Time’s Reach. A half-dozen professional productions have been mounted of her full-length stage plays, including Crackpot and For Love or Money. She has also had over 100 plays produced by CBC and BBC radio, and monologues and scenes from her works have been included in many anthologies, most recently in the Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women.

Rachel Wyatt immigrated to Canada with her family in 1957. She was Director of the Writing Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts during the 1990s and has appeared at writer's conferences across Canada and internationally. She has won the CBC Literary Competition Drama Award and was Awarded the Order of Canada in 2002 and the Queen's Jubilee Medal in 2003.

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