A gorgeous Beijing-set novel of music, secrets and self-discovery
For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. With her marriage, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her desire to have a child.
Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her long-buried family secrets. Soon strange parcels start to show up on the doorstep and Song Yan's dreams become troubling and claustrophobic. Striking out alone through the winter city, she finds herself pulled into the ancient hutongs to confront the source of her unease.
In a silent room within a timeless house, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of all the pain and beauty in her life?
Praise forBraised Pork:
'Startlingly original'Guardian
'Intensely atmospheric'LA Review of Books
'Otherworldly and deeply moving' BuzzFeed
'Real magic'LitHub
'Shimmering' Wall Street Journal
'Rich and wild'Observer
'Enchanting'Shelf Awareness
'Electric'TIME
Genre: Literary Fiction
For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. With her marriage, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her desire to have a child.
Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her long-buried family secrets. Soon strange parcels start to show up on the doorstep and Song Yan's dreams become troubling and claustrophobic. Striking out alone through the winter city, she finds herself pulled into the ancient hutongs to confront the source of her unease.
In a silent room within a timeless house, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of all the pain and beauty in her life?
Praise forBraised Pork:
'Startlingly original'Guardian
'Intensely atmospheric'LA Review of Books
'Otherworldly and deeply moving' BuzzFeed
'Real magic'LitHub
'Shimmering' Wall Street Journal
'Rich and wild'Observer
'Enchanting'Shelf Awareness
'Electric'TIME
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"An Yu's lush, delicate novel Ghost Music unfolds like Claude Debussy's atmospheric piece for solo piano Reverie, lulling the reader into protagonist Song Yan's surrealistic daydream of a life. As the former pianist and young wife confronts the stark reality of her marriage with suppressed but deeply felt emotions, she begins to test the limits of her freedom and finds that like the mysterious mushrooms that appear in the mail and in her dreams, she, too, may thrive in darkness." - Chris Cander
"Dreamlike and diurnal, haunted and lucid, ambivalent and hopeful, An Yu's Ghost Music pulses with profound mystery. A disquieting, mesmerizing novel." - Sara Freeman
"To read Ghost Music's spare prose is to discover its cogency. Yu allows our quiet manias to grow apace with her staggering imagination. An Yu's second novel affirms her as one of our most important writers." - Zain Khalid
"Enthralling and elegant, Ghost Music conjures a world I have never seen before: dreamlike, mysterious, suspenseful in the secrets it reveals, while always being grounded in the sensory. The narrator's wise sensibility drew me in, but I stayed for the sentences--each one more astonishing than the next, they revealed an extraordinary depth of feeling. Like a Ryuichi Sakamoto composition, this novel casts a haunting spell." - Sanaë Lemoine
"Dreamlike and diurnal, haunted and lucid, ambivalent and hopeful, An Yu's Ghost Music pulses with profound mystery. A disquieting, mesmerizing novel." - Sara Freeman
"To read Ghost Music's spare prose is to discover its cogency. Yu allows our quiet manias to grow apace with her staggering imagination. An Yu's second novel affirms her as one of our most important writers." - Zain Khalid
"Enthralling and elegant, Ghost Music conjures a world I have never seen before: dreamlike, mysterious, suspenseful in the secrets it reveals, while always being grounded in the sensory. The narrator's wise sensibility drew me in, but I stayed for the sentences--each one more astonishing than the next, they revealed an extraordinary depth of feeling. Like a Ryuichi Sakamoto composition, this novel casts a haunting spell." - Sanaë Lemoine
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