Set in the world of classical music, Marianne Langner Zeitlin’s third novel is a suspenseful page-turner that takes us on a young woman's quest to understand her family’s difficult past. Under an assumed name, Elizabeth Guaranga takes a job with the famed music manager Alfred Rossiter, who was once her late mother's lover. Rossiter’s name was synonymous with evil in Elizabeth’s home: he had lured her mother away from the family, and then used his power to squelch her father’s career as a concert pianist. After Elizabeth meets the writer George Wentworth, who is writing a biography of Rossiter, she begins to learn that the truth she is seeking is far different from what she had been led to believe.
Zeitlin has spent her entire adult life in the world of classical music—as the wife of acclaimed violinist Zvi Zeitlin, as one of the first women to manage an orchestra herself, and, in her young adulthood, as an employee at one of the largest music management firms in the United States. She brings her wealth of knowledge about the music world to this riveting tale of loss, love, power, and the immutability of one’s past.
 
Motherless Child contains a Book Group Discussion Guide.
 
Marianne Langner Zeitlin is the author of numerous short stories, essays, articles and dramatic works. She has published two other novels, Mira’s Passage (Dell) and Next of Kin (Zephyr Press), which won a City of Toronto Book Award, and her stories have been anthologized in two collections. Recent stories have been published in FictionFix.net, Passager, Aethlon, Scribblers on the Roof, and Jewishfiction.net. She lives in Rochester, New York.