The Big Music - Tapa dura

'Remarkable ... demands that readers put themselves into the same headspace as they would before embarking on a novel by, say, William Faulkner, James Joyce or Woolf. As with those modernists, there is also a story here, a moving one, involving emotionally distant fathers and self-exiled sons ... Gunn is to be applauded for her ambition.' --Susan Elderkin, FINANCIAL TIMES

'The attentive voice of Gunn's graceful prose [places] the reader inside the space of the music. It is a remarkable book.' --Kathryn Sutherland, TLS Books of the Year

'The Big Music matches the structure of its story to the virtuoso improvisations of the Highland piper's art, but the pulsing bass here remains a moving story of fathers, children and a culture in peril.' ----Boyd Tonkin, INDEPENDENT, Books of the Year

'The Big Music is both challenging and conventional, a 'novel' which will satisfy those who love poetry and narrative prose alike; it is often lyrical, sometimes flinty, soft as a bog, or as potently smouldering as a peat fire, smoking, secretive, intriguing ... It is rare to read anything so riveting ... it captivates and illuminates.' --Tom Adair, SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

'The Big Music matches the structure of its story to the virtuoso improvisations of the Highland piper's art, but the pulsing bass here remains a moving story of fathers, children and a culture in peril.' ----Boyd Tonkin, INDEPENDENT, Books of the Year

'The Big Music is both challenging and conventional, a 'novel' which will satisfy those who love poetry and narrative prose alike; it is often lyrical, sometimes flinty, soft as a bog, or as potently smouldering as a peat fire, smoking, secretive, intriguing ... It is rare to read anything so riveting ... it captivates and illuminates.' --Tom Adair, SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

'The hills only come back the same: I don't mind . . .' begins Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music, a novel that takes us to a new understanding of how fiction can affect us.

Presented as a collection of found papers, appendices and notes, The Big Music tells the story of John Sutherland of 'The Grey House', who is dying and creating in the last days of his life a musical composition that will define it. Yet he has little idea of how his tune will echo or play out into the world - and as the book moves inevitably through its themes of death and birth, change and stasis, the sound of his solitary story comes to merge and connect with those around him.

In this work of fiction, Kirsty Gunn has created something as real as music or as a dream. Not so much a novel as a place the reader comes to inhabit and to know, The Big Music is a literary work of undeniable originality and power.