Ghost Music

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

A gorgeous novel of music, secrets and self-discovery from the brilliant young author of Braised Pork


For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. With her marriage, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her desire to have a child.

Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her long-buried family secrets. Soon strange parcels start to show up on the doorstep and Song Yan's dreams become troubling and claustrophobic. Striking out alone through the winter city, she finds herself pulled into the ancient hutongs to confront the source of her unease. In a still, silent room in a timeless house, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of all the pain and beauty in her life?

Evocative, magical and endlessly surprising, Ghost Music is a captivating journey through memory, expression and self-discovery towards the shimmer of new beginnings.

Praise for Braised Pork:

'Startlingly original' Guardian
'Intensely atmospheric' LA Review of Books
'Otherworldly and deeply moving' BuzzFeed
'Real magic' LitHub
'Shimmering' Wall Street Journal
'Rich and wild' Observer
'Enchanting' Shelf Awareness
'Electric' TIME

©2022 An Yu (P)2022 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

An intriguing book that knits together music and life to touch on something profound
Guardian
Vivid descriptions of contemporary Beijing ... Yu writes in clear, unadorned prose and deftly threads the magic-realist elements through the main narrative
Financial Times
Transporting, searching and poetic
List
This playful, often surreal novel packs in plenty ... an elusive tale, steeped in atmosphere
Mail on Sunday
Ghost Music has beautiful prose and claustrophobic imagery that intensely evokes its protagonist's alienation
New Statesman
Spellbinding and atmospheric . . . With its quiet, dreamy bending of reality and its precise depiction of many different strains of alienation, Ghost Music is an evocative exploration of what it means to live fully-and the potential consequences of failing to do so. Yu braids the mundane and the magical together with a gentle hand . . . There's something here of early Murakami's graceful, open-ended approach to the uncanny, as well as the vivid yet muted emotionality of Patrick Modiano or Katie Kitamura. Like these skillful portraitists of alienation, Yu conjures a visceral inbetweenness where the worlds of matter and spirit meet in a shared, suspended space
New York Times Book Review
Startlingly original
Guardian on BRAISED PORK
Intensely atmospheric
LA Review of Books on BRAISED PORK
Otherwordly and deeply moving
BuzzFeed on BRAISED PORK
Real magic
LitHub on BRAISED PORK

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