Short description
A powerful love story from the author of the international bestseller A SUITABLE BOY
Long description
A chance sighting on a bus; a letter which should never have been read; a pianist with a secret that touches the heart of her music ...AN EQUALl MUSIC is a book about love, about the love of a woman lost and found and lost again; it is a book about music and how the love of music can run like a passionate fugue through a life. It is the story of Michael, of Julia, and of the love that binds them. 'A novel that can stand being reread and reread, but the first time round is an emotional cliffhanger ...secure a copy for yourself, settle down, and prepare for the unforgettable' Sunday Times
Review
'Under the arrow of Eros I sit down and weep.' If this sentence hovers close to parody or pastiche, it is also poetic and plangent, with just a hint of self-mockery, and it perfectly distils the variegated tone of Seth's novel. An Equal Music is a love story in which the object of desire is as much the art of music as it is the elusive Julia. Michael, who tells the story in the present tense, plays the violin in a string quartet. The life of this group, its rehearsals, dependencies and tensions, is the quietly flowing current which provides some sense of fragile continuity to what might otherwise be too evanescent a novel. For this is a book about the impermanence of relationships and the nostalgia which governs so large a part of our existences. Readers expecting to return to the India of A Suitable Boy will be confounded - this is set mainly in central London, with Lancashire, Vienna and Venice also impinging upon the action. Seth's mastery of dialogue and his gentle nuanced descriptive art are, however, as subtle here as in anything he has written. This is a loving novel in which Terpsichore is the prevailing muse, not Eros. Review by ALASTAIR NIVEN, Director of the British Council (Kirkus UK)