The Variations
Patrick Langley
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From the publisher
Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift – an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past. When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty – or impossibility – of living with the past.
‘If Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black were written by John Banville channelling M. John Harrison, the result would look something like this. And yet Langley has made something new and unexpected about how the present is, necessarily and always, an echo corridor of the past. Beautifully written, powered by a wonderfully intelligent conceptual dynamo, and deftly sprung with surprises, The Variations is an utterly original book about haunting. It is strange, resonant, and, yes, haunting.’
— Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
‘The Variations is a passionate meditation on how past and present meet and annihilate one another in the flare of individual human experience. Music is presented as a kind of weather, blustery and changeable, unlimited by its own time. It takes you up, puts you down, whirls you away. Langley’s prose, lyrical and accurate, enlivens and illuminates. A tremendous, seriously ambitious novel.’
— M. John Harrison, author of Wish I Was Here
‘A novel humming with deep emotional truths and pitch-perfect execution. I loved it.’
— Steven Hall, author of Maxwell’s Demon
‘I thought The Variations was remarkable. I loved its hallucinatory vision of music as both gift and affliction, as a sort of crystallised form of human history. A book of strange and revelatory genius’
— Anna Smaill, author of The Chimes
‘A skilfully told story about inheritance and inspiration, music and time. Langley has a fine eye for detail and scene-making, and The Variations is full of startling observations and images.’
— Martin MacInnes, author of In Ascension
‘Langley uses the language of music, and of movement, to wrap around something much more propulsive: the difficulty – or impossibility – of living with the past (the past being things that are now gone), of grieving it, or anticipating it.’
— Bryson Edward Howe, The Big Ship