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  • Published: 27 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529112177
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $26.00

Ghost Music

From the author of the stylish cult hit Braised Pork



For readers of early Murakami, a beautiful and uncanny novel of music, dreams and memory

For three years Song Yan has filled her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She finds herself adrift, but her husband seems reluctant for a child of their own. It takes the arrival of her mother-in-law, together with sudden strange parcels and stranger dreams, to shake Song Yan from her malaise. Summoned to an ancient house in the heart of the city, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of the pain and beauty in her life?

  • Published: 27 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529112177
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 240
  • RRP: $26.00

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Praise for Ghost Music

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

Shimmering

Wall Street Journal on BRAISED PORK

Rich and wild

Observer on BRAISED PORK

Enchanting

Shelf Awareness on BRAISED PORK

Electric

TIME on BRAISED PORK

Transporting, searching and poetic

List

Vivid descriptions of contemporary Beijing ... Yu writes in clear, unadorned prose and deftly threads the magic-realist elements through the main narrative

Financial Times

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

An intriguing book that knits together music and life to touch on something profound

Guardian

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

Alexandra Kleeman, New York Times Book Review