Classical Music Novels Published in 2022
We’ve recently opened an online musical bookshop, stocked with fictional novels relating to classical music, with books about pianists, composers, organists, conductors, music therapists and more. Below is a selection of books published in 2022 about music students, cellists, orchestras, choristers, opera singers and former classical music prodigies, all of which can be found in our shop. To support us, order your copy via the links below (all go to the paperback edition where it’s available).
Jo Browning Wroe, published by Faber & Faber
Choral music is elegantly woven throughout this novel about ex-Cambridge chorister William Lavery, who is having the night of his life at his first black-tie do. As the evening unfolds, news hits of a landslide at a coal mine. It has buried a school: Aberfan. William decides he must act, so he stands and volunteers to attend as an embalmer. His work that night will force him to think about the little boy he was, and the losses he has worked so hard to forget. But compassion can have surprising consequences, because - as William discovers - giving so much to others can sometimes help us heal ourselves.
Indyana Schneider, published by Simon & Schuster
Amalia is in the first year of a Music degree when she meets final year student Alex. They are both swept away by the immediacy and intensity of their connection. Gradually, it dawns upon them both that their feelings for one another may be more than platonic but dare they risk a romantic entanglement if it threatens this most perfect of friendships?
Suffused with music, literature, film, art and the pure pain and pleasure of first love, 28 Questions offers a queer take on that line from When Harry Met Sally about men and women not being able to be friends because the sex always gets in the way.
Imogen Crimp, published by Bloomsbury
Anna is struggling to afford life in London as she trains to be a singer. During the day, she vies to succeed against her course mates with their discreet but inexhaustible streams of cultural capital and money, and in the evening she sings jazz at a bar in the City to make ends meet.
Here she meets Max, a financier 14 years older than her. Over the course of one winter, Anna’s intoxication oscillates between her hard-won moments on stage, where she can zip herself into the skin of her characters, and nights spent with Max in his glass-walled flat overlooking the city. But Anna’s fledgling career demands her undivided attention, and increasingly – whether he necessarily wills it or not – so does Max…
Nell Stevens, published by Pan Macmillan
In 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her children travel to a monastery in Mallorca. They are there to create and to convalesce, to live a simple life after the wildness of their Paris days.
Witness to this tumultuous arrival is Blanca, the ghost of a teenage girl who has been at the monastery for over 300 years. Having lived in a world full, according to her mother, of ‘beautiful men’, she has found that in death it is the women she falls for. And then George Sand arrives, this beautiful woman in a man’s clothes, and Blanca is in love.
But the rest of the village is suspicious of the newcomers, and as George tries to keep her family and herself from falling apart, as Chopin writes prelude after prelude in despair on his tuneless piano, their stay looks likely to end in disaster…
James Runcie, published by Bloomsbury
In 1727, Stefan Silbermann is a grief-stricken 13-year-old, struggling with the death of his mother and his removal to a school in distant Leipzig. Despite his father's insistence that he try not to think of his mother too much, Stefan is haunted by her absence, and, to make matters worse, he's bullied by his new classmates. But when the school's cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, takes notice of his new pupil's beautiful singing voice and draws him from the choir to be a soloist, Stefan's life is permanently changed.
Over the course of the next several months, and under Bach's careful tutelage, Stefan's musical skill progresses, and he is allowed to work as a copyist for Bach's many musical works. But mainly, drawn into Bach's family life and away from the cruelty in the dorms and the lonely hours of his mourning, Stefan begins to feel at home. When another tragedy strikes, this time in the Bach family, Stefan bears witness to the depths of grief, the horrors of death, the solace of religion, and the beauty that can spring from even the most profound losses.
Ian McEwan, published by Vintage
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, 11-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
Joe Meno, published by Akashic Books
Aleksander and Isobel are siblings and former classical music prodigies, once destined for greatness. Both now in their 20s, they find themselves encountering ridiculous jobs, unfulfilling romantic relationships, and the outrageousness of ordinary life. Doomed by fate, a family history of failure, an odd mother, an absent father, and a younger brother with a peculiar fondness for catastrophes, the two siblings have all but given up. But when an illness forces Isobel to move back into the family home with her 3-year-old daughter, everything changes for Aleks. Over the course of several months, he becomes deeply involved in the endless challenges that surround his relatives. Once Isobel begins playing cello again and announces her intention to audition for an amateur symphony, Aleks comes to see a world of possibility and wonder in the lives of his extraordinarily complicated family.
Jennifer Atkins, published by Peninsula Press
Luc has lived a long time as a soloist. She has not seen Billy for many years. A visit to a major show of his sculptures sends her arrowing back to a younger version of herself: to a time when she had to make room to love him when she'd felt no room within herself. To a time when she was forced to make a choice between being one thing or another. To a time when he was a sculptor, but she was not yet a cellist.
The Cellist explores how you might make room for beauty and mastery for yourself, and still leave space for someone else. It asks what love and companionship costs: what happens when you are forced to cast yourself in the distorting light of another person's needs?
Isabel Rogers, published by Duckworth Books
After a brief and disastrous Resident Poet episode, Stockwell Park Orchestra is invited to take part in a TV competition for classical music. For a £50,000 prize some competitors are tempted to stretch the genre to ‘crossover’ and beyond.
Can a full concert orchestra compete with jazz bands, horn quartets, harp ensembles, and Mrs Ford-Hughes singing in Portuguese with nine cellos? Or will the competition be derailed by the poet’s return, this time sporting live Ambient Sounds? The TV producers aren’t worried: they know a good fight means great ratings.
What was supposed to be a quirky diversion threatens to take over the orchestra’s rehearsals for their own concert, but discovering a voting scam means they must fix things in the TV studio first.
Hannah Fiddy is a creative entrepreneur, developing new audiences for classical music. She has created and promoted numerous concerts outside of traditional spaces, including warehouses, pubs, clubs, museums, hospitals, prisons and even in Primark. Hannah is also an interviewer, writer and guest lecturer, and runs the Avon Chamber Choir in Bristol. In a past life she founded London Flashmob, producing quirky events from wedding proposals to cultural pranks for up to 1,000 people.
Follow Hannah on Twitter @Hannah_Fiddy.