Lessons in Harmony

LESSONS IN HARMONY is a delicious composition: entertaining, poignant and covertly argumentative. Its ideas appear as motifs, answering each other subtly, while human feeling, however restrained or constrained, remains at its centre. In both its form and its themes, the book can also be read as a disguised meditation on Coe’s own aesthetics. If, in the past, he has been accused of a fondness for artifice, here we have Ravel, the son of an engineer, revelling in that very charge. And while the subject of Englishness has at times been emotionally conflicting for Coe, in this novel he sketches "a more generous patriotism — hospitable and outward-looking, ironic and self-doubting". Ultimately, LESSONS IN HARMONY achieves in language the pleasure, understatement, delicacy and emotional weight which its own characters seek to deliver in music

FINANCIAL TIMES

LESSONS IN HARMONY is a witty, poignant, layered blend of memoir, anecdote and recollection, so convincingly rendered that one neither knows (nor cares) where fact ends and fiction begins. I was left ruminating not only the impact creatives have on each other, but also how Coe succeeds in balancing, with so light a touch, harmony, discord, and sacrifice in the musical, the personal, AND the political. A highly satisfying, wise and humane read

JOANNA MILLER

LESSONS IN HARMONY, the story of the bond between two giants of twentieth century music, is as witty, lapidary and elegant as a Ravel miniature and as rich and deep as Vaughan Williams at his most lyrical. With his love of music, European culture and the foibles of Britishness, Jonathan Coe is uniquely equipped to craft this story of male friendship, art, love and nationhood

STUART MACONIE

A new Jonathan Coe is always a treat

THE TIMES

A novelist who gains in range and reputation with every book

PAT BARKER

Absolutely wonderful - I just loved it. A book that slowly, quietly reveals its themes and points of view. Beautifully, elegantly, movingly done

CHRIS ADDISON

Coe’s light, funny writing makes you feel better

Evening Standard

I was completely convinced and engrossed by the fictional reconstruction of the friendship between those two very different composers. The writing has all the subtlety and wit that is customary for Jonathan Coe, but rare, and there is so much wisdom in it - about the sacrifices demanded of the friends and partners in the orbit of a musical genius, about rivalry, disappointment, and the convulsions of world politics

CLARE CHAMBERS

My comfort read: anything by Jonathan Coe

BOB MORTIMER

Please God... if there is a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe

ANTHONY BOURDAIN

Probably the best English novelist of his generation'

NICK HORNBY

The best novel about music I have read!

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