‘Friendship, betrayal and making sense of the past’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Catherine Czerkawska

You may recognise the name of my guest this week. She was one of my earliest Soundtrackers and she returns this week with a novel of friendship and betrayal: a man looking back on his youth and making sense of a troubled history. It’s set in Glasgow, and traditional Scottish music gave her both geographical setting and emotional landscape: the depth in apparent simplicity, the universal condition of loving and losing. She is novelist and award-winning playwright Catherine Czerkawska; the novel is The Physic Garden and she’s on the Red Blog with its Undercover Soundtrack.

‘This uncanny, heartrending and deeply disturbing sound’ – Catherine Czerkawska on The Undercover Soundtrack

‘Which came first? The change in the book or the change to the music of the book?’ When novelist and award-winning playwright Catherine Czerkawska embarked on a search for the truth of her characters, she found it in raw, traditional Irish folk songs. Bird of Passage is the novel, and Catherine is my guest on The Undercover Soundtrack – over at the red blog