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Ravel

Jean Echenoz · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Orfeo

Richard Powers · 369 pages

Seventy-year old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police outside. His DIY microbiology lab - the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to extract music from rich patterns beyond the ear's ability to hear - has come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid on his house, Els flees and turns fugitive, waiting for the evidence to clear him an

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMale Lead
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Us Conductors

Sean Michaels · 347 pages

"In a finely woven series of flashbacks and correspondence, Lev Termen, the Russian scientist, inventor, and spy, tells the story of his life to his "one true love, " Clara Rockmore, the finest theremin player in the world. In the first half of the book, we learn of Termen's early days as a scientist in Leningrad during the Bolshevik Revolution, the acclaim he receives as the inventor of the there

MusicianCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Under The Visible Life

Kim Echlin · 348 pages

Fatherless Katherine carries the stigma of her mixed-race background through an era that is hostile to her and all she represents. It is only through music that she finds the freedom to temporarily escape and dream of a better life for herself, nurturing this hard-won refuge throughout the vagaries of unexpected motherhood and an absent husband, and relying on her talent to build a future for her

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Song of Hartgrove Hall

Natasha Solomons · 400 pages

"A captivating novel that evokes the author's New York Times bestseller The House at Tyneford Natasha Solomons's breathtaking new novel has it all: a love triangle, family obligations, and rediscovering joy in the face of grief, all set against the alluring backdrop of an English country estate perfect for fans of Downton Abbey It's a terrible thing to covet your brother's girl New Year's Eve, Dor

MusicianCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The piano man's daughter

Timothy Findley · 490 pages

Narrated by Charlie Kilworth, whose birth is an echo of his mother's own illegitimate beginnings, The Piano Man's Daughter is the lyrical, multilayered tale of Charlie's mother, Lily, his grandmother Ede, and their family. Lily is a woman pursued by her own demons, "making off with the matches just when the fires caught hold," "a beautiful, mad genius, first introduced to us singing in her mother'

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Cry to Heaven

Anne Rice · 544 pages

In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voi

MusicianCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Shotgun Lovesongs

Nickolas Butler · 329 pages

"Hank, Leland, Kip and Ronny were all born and raised in the same Wisconsin town--Little Wing--and are now coming into their own (or not) as husbands and fathers. One of them never left, still farming the family's land that's been tilled for generations. Others did leave, went farther afield to make good, with varying degrees of success; as a rock star, commodities trader, rodeo stud. And seamless

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMale Lead
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The Noise of Time

Julian Barnes · 183 pages

"A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich--Julian Barnes's first novel since his best-selling, Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. 1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or,

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Coming Through Slaughter

Michael Ondaatje · 156 pages

Buddy Bolden, a New Orleans barber, cornet player, and full-time editor of a gossip sheet, disappears for two years, and when he returns, he goes berserk and spends his final years in the East Louisiana state hospital.

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Music & Silence

Rose Tremain · 488 pages

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMale Lead
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The Song Is You

Arthur Phillips · 254 pages

Julian Donahue is in love with his iPod.Each song that shuffles through "that greatest of all human inventions" triggers a memory. There are songs for the girls from when he was single; there's the one for the day he met his wife-to-be, and another for the day his son was born. But when his family falls apart, even music loses its hold on him, and he has nothing.Until one snowy night in Brooklyn,

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMale Lead
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers · 334 pages

Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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As It Is in Heaven

Niall Williams · 310 pages

"Stephen Griffin is a shy and lonely schoolteacher in the West of Ireland, and his father Philip is a tailor whose wife and daughter died tragically in a car crash fifteen years ago. While Stephen yearns for love and an escape from the monotony of the classroom, his father's only desire is to be reunited with his family in heaven. The appearance of Gabriella Castoldi, a spellbinding musician, turn

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMale Lead
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Music And Freedom

Zoe Morrison · 352 pages

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Half Blood Blues

Esi Edugyan · 331 pages

"Berlin, 1939. The Hot-Time Swingers, a popular German American jazz band, have been forbidden to play live because the Nazis have banned their 'degenerate music.' After escaping to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong, the band's brilliant young trumpet-player, Hieronymus Falk, is arrested in a café by the Gestapo. It is June 1940. He is never heard from again. He is twenty years old, a German

MusicianLiterary FictionParisMale Lead
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Gertrude

Hermann Hesse, Hilda Rosner · 237 pages

In this fictional memoir, the renowned composer Kuhn recounts his tangled relationships with two artists--his friend Heinrich Muoth, a brooding, self-destructive opera singer, and the gentle, self-assured Gertrude Imthor. Kuhn is drawn to Gertrude upon their first meeting, but Gertrude falls in love with Heinrich, to whom she is introduced when Kuhn auditions them for the leads in his new opera. H

MusicianLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenMale Lead
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The Thrill of it All

Joseph O'Connor · 402 pages

At college in 1980s Luton, Robbie Goulding, an Irish-born teenager, meets elusive Fran Mulvey, an orphaned Vietnamese refugee. Together they form a band. Joined by cellist Sarah-Thérèse Sherlock and her twin brother Sean on drums, The Ships in the Night set out to chase fame. But the story of this makeshift family is haunted by ghosts from the past. Spanning 25 years, 'The Thrill of it All' rewind

MusicianCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionMale Lead
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Love and Gravity

Samantha Sotto · 308 pages

MusicianCharacter-DrivenHistorical FictionLyrical Prose
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The Spanish Bow

Andromeda Romano-Lax · 560 pages

MusicianCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionMale Lead
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The Paperbark Shoe

Goldie Goldbloom · 374 pages

In the wake of a thwarted career as a concert pianist and the accompanying emotional fallout, Gin accepts a marriage proposal from the peculiar Mr. Toad. But nothing from the albino Gin Toad's upbringing in the bourgeois drawing rooms of Perth has prepared her for a hardscrabble existence on a subsistence farm in the Australian outback.

MusicianCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The Lost Get-Back Boogie

James Lee Burke · 256 pages

Iry Paret's done his time -- two years for manslaughter in Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary. Now the war vet and blues singer is headed to Montana, where he hopes to live clean working on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. In prison, Iry tinkered with a song -- "The Lost Get-Back Boogie" -- that never came out quite right. Now, the Riordan family's problems hand him

MusicianCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionMale Lead
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White Truffles in Winter

N.M. Kelby · 351 pages

White Truffles in Winter imagines the world of the remarkable French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935), who changed how we eat through his legendary restaurants at the Savoy and the Ritz. A man of contradictions - kind yet imperious, food-obsessed yet rarely hungry - Escoffier was also torn between two women: the famous, beautiful, and reckless actress Sarah Bernhardt and his wife, the independen

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionParisElderly Protagonist
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Almost Famous Women: Stories

Megan Mayhew Bergman · 281 pages

A collection of stories that explores the lives of talented, gutsy women throughout history. Now Megan Mayhew Bergman resurrects these women, lets them live in the reader's imagination, so we can explore their difficult choices. Nearly every story in this collection is based on a woman who attained some celebrity--she raced speed boats or was a conjoined twin in show business; a reclusive painter

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenMusicianHistorical Fiction

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