Description
Book SynopsisCaptivating and hypnotic writing from a prize-winning novelist, whose prose is reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson''s and Paul Harding''s.
New York, June 1961. The Bill Evans Trio, featuring twenty-five year old Scott LaFaro on bass, play a series of concerts at the Village Vanguard that will go down in musical history. Shortly afterwards, LaFaro is killed in a car accident, and Evans disappears. Intermission tells the story of what happens next.
In measured, evocative prose, Intermission takes a period from the life of one of America's great artists and fashions it into a fiction of extraordinary imaginative skill and ambition. The novel inhabits the lives of four people in orbit around a tragedy, presenting an intense and moving portrait of the burden of grief, and of a man lost to his family and to himself. It is also a conjuring of a pivotal moment in American music and culture, and a unique representation of the jazz scene in the early 1960s.
Trade Review
An introspective, original novel…It is hard to write about figures of recent history in a way that feels authentic and true, but Bill Evans is drawn here in all his quirkiness and mutability…This novel stands as a well-written lament. It is a clear-eyed exploration of a jazz intermission, of the forced break in the chaos, and an apt tribute to a music so full of life that even a pause, a silence, can go down howling. -- Esi Edugyan * Guardian *
This fine if elusive novel about a jazz giant echoes his art in both its style and its story-telling…A novel as oblique, elusive but quietly hypnotic as its hero’s own playing. -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent *
A sensitive depiction of an artist in mourning…A delicate and affecting work of fiction…[Martell] writes with elegant precision…Intermission is an impressive English-language debut, a deft and sensitive depiction of a family shadowed by loss. * Financial Times *
The mood music conjured up is evocative, reflective and muted…Martell’s wonderful portrait…is as vivid as it is sympathetic…Lingers in the mind like an elusive, mournful melody. * Daily Mail *
Superb. * Irish Times *
