Author(s): James Wieland

Australian author

‘Michael O’Connell is dead!’  Spanning the week of his burial, from his obituary to the wake, eight characters whose lives – some intimately, some more obliquely – have intersected his, slowly open up the carefully constructed compartments of his very private, very financially successful, life, even as they reveal themselves.  A luminous story of disclosure and concealment, of love and its opposites explored in their various tones and shades, and of those who embrace life’s alternatives and those who deny them, Octet’s canvas is broad, spreading from the Wicklow Stud in the southern hinterland of New South Wales to the battlefields of New  Guinea, from the ballet stages of Europe to the Business world in London, from Edinburgh to Sydney, in a timespan which reaches from the Second World War to the turn of the century. Why did Michael make the gift of the cello?