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Book Synopsis'BARNES'S MASTERPIECE' - OBSERVER
In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return.
‘Stunning’ Sunday Times
‘A profound meditation on power and the relationship of art and power… It is a masterpiece of sympathetic understanding… I don’t think Barnes has written a finer, more truthful or more profound book’ Scotsman
‘A tour de force by a master novelist at the top of his game’ Daily Express
Trade ReviewA great novel, Barnes’s masterpiece… Exquisite, intimate detail. He has given us a novel that is
powerfully affecting, a condensed masterpiece that traces the lifelong battle of one man’s conscience, one man’s art, with the insupportable exigencies of totalitarianism. -- Alex Preston * Observer *
Barnes’s sombre, brilliant new novel opens with a scene
like something from a story by Chekhov…
Gleaming with intelligence and literary flair, this elegantly composed fictional meditation offers a fresh gloss on a musical genius’s collisions and collusions with power. -- Peter Kemp * Sunday Times *
[Barnes is] a master of the narrative sidestep…
Not just a novel about music, but something more like a musical novel… The story itself is structured in three parts that come together like a broken chord. It is a simple but brilliant device, and one that goes right to the heart of this novel. -- Robert Douglas-Fairhurst * The Times *
A compelling novel about art and power, courage and cowardice, and the capriciousness of fate…Barnes brilliantly captures the composer’s conflicted state of mind…This book is only 190 pages long, but it
packs an extraordinary emotional punch. -- Sebastian Shakespeare * Tatler *
The writing in the early pages is
magnificent…
The reader has the confidence of being in the hands of a master storyteller… Barnes has a good sense of what life was like in the Soviet Union. He captures well the black humor, irony and cynicism. -- Orlando Figes * New York Review of Books *
