Incidental Music A Novel by Lydia Perovic List price: $22.95 Paperback Fiction Fall 2012 Inanna Publications ISBN: 9781926708812 49thShelf Amazon.ca Chapters        Can one try to live a good life and still pay one's bills? What are the arts good for anyway, especially in times of unrest and scarcity? Does love, and the ways we love now, help us see the others more clearly or fog our vision, distract from our purpose and make us selfish? Set in present-day Toronto, Incidental Music is a novel about three very different women grappling with these questions.        Petra, in her thirties, is new to the city. She is eager to establish roots and finally feel somewhere at home, but keeps losing jobs, finds it impossible to make friends or adopt a cause. Martha, in her fifties, is at home in every way. Prosperous, compassionate and intellectual, she is a happily married mother of grown children who just might have built everything in her life on an impressive amount of self-deception. A retired opera singer well into her seventies, Romola left Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising, having played part in it as a member of the group of performing artists Sektor 7. She had an international career since, but now rarely leaves her mid-town apartment.        The lives of the women overlap, but there is never any unison. Petra, Martha and Romola are like the three operatic voices--soprano, mezzo and alto--that only sometimes pair up their melodic lines. Martha and Petra, who have a tumultuous affair, share awareness of  their urban environs and love the city, whereas Romola, who becomes Petra's employer, only ever inhabits a tenebrous geography of remorse and subterfuge.        Incidental Music is unapologetically Toronto-centric, but its civic and heritage threads will be of interest to any city dweller concerned with future of the urban commons. Its characters move through a remarkable range of intellectual domains--philosophy, opera, heritage and urban development, Canadian society and politics, the changing nature of work and the recent histories of two Eastern European countries.        This book will have your heart by way of your mind. An excerpt was published in Steel Bananas Quarterly, Issue 28, September 2011    Earlier Short Fiction Heimat, Mutter Short story Joyland.ca, July 2010 web No Stones off Florence Short story Matrix Magazine, Montreal. New Feminisms Issue, #85,  February 2010 pdf