The Melody

Description

Alfred Busi, famed and beloved in his town for his music and songs, is now in his sixties, mourning the recent death of his wife and quietly living out his days alone in the large villa he has always called home. The night before he is due to attend a ceremony at the town's avenue of fame, Busi is attacked by a creature he disturbs as it raids the contents of his larder. Busi is convinced that the thing that attacked him was no animal, but a child, 'innocent and wild', and his words fan the flames of old rumour - of an ancient race of people living in the bosk surrounding the town - and new controversy: the town's paupers, the feral wastrels at its edges must be dealt with. Once and for all. As Busi's nephew's ambitious plans for himself and the town develop, he is able to fan the flames of rumour and soon Busi and the town he loves will be altered irrevocably. The Melody by Jim Crace is a story about grief and ageing, about reputation and the loss of it, about love and music and the peculiar way myth seeps into real life. And it is a political novel too - a rallying cry to protect those we persecute. It is lyrical and warm, intimate and epic, a powerful future classic.

Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of eleven books, including Continent (winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize), Quarantine (winner of the 1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award). His 2013 novel, Harvest, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Strange, unsettling, brilliant . . . one of our most original and inventive novelists * Observer * Seductively atmospheric . . . deeply moving * Daily Mail * Takes its place among his finest [novels] . . . grippingly symbolic and intensely real * Guardian * Hypnotic and powerful . . . enchanting and disconcerting * Irish Times * The Melody is at its most poignant on the subject of growing old . . . every sentence is packed with Crace's characteristic lyricism * The Times * Jim Crace writes with great flair and inimitable imagination . . . The Melody is lyrical and tender . . . one of Britain's most distinctive and accomplished novelists * Financial Times * Ambitious, powerful * Big Issue * Exquisite . . . another choice example of this twice-Booker-nominated English writer's unique gift * National * A powerful novel about music, human nature and poverty . . . only Kazuo Ishiguro rivals Crace's range in terms of emotional power and unusual subject matter * Financial Times * The book retains a lingering power -- Anthony Cummins * Observer * Impeccably wrought * TLS * Terrific . . . part political allegory, part dream and part deeply tender meditation on grief * Metro * As touching as a well-made melody * Daily Telegraph *