Ghost Music
Published on 2. November 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
240 pages
978-1-5291-1217-7 (ISBN)
Description
For three years Song Yan has filled her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students.
She finds herself adrift, but her husband seems reluctant for a child of their own. It takes the arrival of her mother-in-law, together with sudden strange parcels and stranger dreams, to shake Song Yan from her malaise. Summoned to an ancient house in the heart of the city, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of the pain and beauty in her life?
'There's something here of early Murakami's graceful, open-ended approach to the uncanny... Ghost Music is an evocative exploration of what it means to live fully' New York Times Book Review
'Knits together music and life to touch on something profound' Guardian
She finds herself adrift, but her husband seems reluctant for a child of their own. It takes the arrival of her mother-in-law, together with sudden strange parcels and stranger dreams, to shake Song Yan from her malaise. Summoned to an ancient house in the heart of the city, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of the pain and beauty in her life?
'There's something here of early Murakami's graceful, open-ended approach to the uncanny... Ghost Music is an evocative exploration of what it means to live fully' New York Times Book Review
'Knits together music and life to touch on something profound' Guardian
Reviews / Votes
An intriguing book that knits together music and life to touch on something profound * Guardian * Vivid descriptions of contemporary Beijing ... Yu writes in clear, unadorned prose and deftly threads the magic-realist elements through the main narrative * Financial Times * Transporting, searching and poetic * List * This playful, often surreal novel packs in plenty ... an elusive tale, steeped in atmosphere * Mail on Sunday * Ghost Music has beautiful prose and claustrophobic imagery that intensely evokes its protagonist's alienation * New Statesman * Spellbinding and atmospheric . . . With its quiet, dreamy bending of reality and its precise depiction of many different strains of alienation, Ghost Music is an evocative exploration of what it means to live fully-and the potential consequences of failing to do so. Yu braids the mundane and the magical together with a gentle hand . . . There's something here of early Murakami's graceful, open-ended approach to the uncanny, as well as the vivid yet muted emotionality of Patrick Modiano or Katie Kitamura. Like these skillful portraitists of alienation, Yu conjures a visceral inbetweenness where the worlds of matter and spirit meet in a shared, suspended space -- Alexandra Kleeman * New York Times Book Review * Startlingly original * Guardian on BRAISED PORK * Intensely atmospheric * LA Review of Books on BRAISED PORK * Otherwordly and deeply moving * BuzzFeed on BRAISED PORK * Real magic * LitHub on BRAISED PORK *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 199 mm
Width: 133 mm
Thickness: 37 mm
Weight
174 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5291-1217-7 (9781529112177)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
11/2022
Vintage Digital
€8.99
Available for download
Person
An Yu was born and raised in Beijing. She left at the age of eighteen to study in New York City. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she writes her fiction in English and lives in Hong Kong. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Braised Pork and Ghost Music.