A beautiful hardback gift anthology of short stories about music by a remarkable array of literary greats, selected by Wesley Stace who is both a musician and a writer. Variations on a musical theme by a striking range of authors, among them Flaubert, Turgenev, Proust, Nabokov, Katherine Mansfield, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Bernard MacLaverty and Maya Angelou. Wesley Stace’s attractive medley embraces musical genres from Virginia Woolf’s ‘A String Quartet’ to Langston Hughes’s ‘The Blues I’m Playing’ and Cathi Unsworth’s rock-‘n’-roll ‘Johnny, Remember Me’. Short stories are interspersed with interludes from longer works – E. M. Forster’s Howards End, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto and Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music. Here are music lessons, solos and duets, rehearsals and performances – and a whole suite of stories demonstrating that music is indeed the food of love. The perfect marriage of the musical and the literary.
