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  • Published: 6 December 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241966075
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 19

Pentatonic

A Story of Music




A daring and original story about family and memory inspired by music

When a family celebrates the prize-giving day at their daughter's secondary school, thoughts turn to their own childhoods. The father remembers his living room piano recital, recorded on a well-worn cassette tape. The mother remembers her own father's war tragedy. As the father searches for the physical reminder of his past and the mother longs to forget her own, they confront the breakdown of their marriage in the present.

In Pentatonic, Jonathan Coe movingly explores the memories that unite us and the experiences that drive us apart. The story is simultaneously available as a digital download with the piece of music which originally inspired the story.

  • Published: 6 December 2013
  • ISBN: 9780241966075
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 19

About the author

Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His novels include Rotters, The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death and What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Itranger.The House of Sleep won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award for 1997.

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1961. He began writing at an early age. His first surviving story, a detective thriller called The Castle of Mystery, was written when he was eight. His first published novel was The Accidental Woman in 1987, but it was his fourth, What a Carve Up!, that established his reputation as one of England’s finest comic novelists, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1985 and being translated into many languages. Seven bestselling novels and many other awards have followed, including the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for Like A Fiery Elephant, a biography of the experimental novelist, B. S. Johnson. Jonathan lives in London with his wife and two daughters.

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Praise for Pentatonic

Coe has huge powers of observation and enormous literary panache

Sunday Times

Jonathan Coe's a fine writer who seems to try something new with every book

David Nicholls

There are bits that make you laugh out loud and others which make your heart ache

Guardian (on The House of Sleep)