Critics' Opinion:
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Published Jan 2023
240 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
From the author of the "original and electric" Braised Pork (Time), An Yu's enchanting and contemplative novel of music and mushrooms follows a former concert pianist searching for the truth about a vanished musician
For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago, but her husband Bowen, an executive at a car company, has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. He resists even when his mother arrives from the southwestern Chinese region of Yunnan and begins her own campaign for a grandchild. As tension in the household rises, it becomes harder for Song Yan to keep her usual placid demeanor, especially since she is troubled by dreams of a doorless room she can't escape, populated only by a strange orange mushroom.
When a parcel of mushrooms native to her mother-in-law's province is delivered seemingly by mistake, Song Yan sees an opportunity to bond with her, and as the packages continue to arrive every week, the women stir-fry and grill the mushrooms, adding them to soups and noodles. When a letter arrives in the mail from the sender of the mushrooms, Song Yan's world begins to tilt further into the surreal. Summoned to an uncanny, seemingly ageless house hidden in a hutong that sits in the middle of the congested city, she finds Bai Yu, a once world-famous pianist who disappeared ten years ago.
A gorgeous and atmospheric novel of art and expression, grief and survival, memory and self-discovery, Ghost Music animates contemporary Beijing through the eyes of a lonely yet hopeful young woman and gives vivid color and texture to the promise of new beginnings.
"Yu mesmerizes with this surreal story of music and mushrooms ... As Song Yan relentlessly surges toward independence and away from solitude and loneliness, Yu's blistering narrative reaches a plaintive end. Readers will be enthralled." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An atmospheric study in disconnected relationships ... In order to live, prodded by talking mushrooms, [an] elusive prodigy, and finally, the music, Song Yan will need to escape her stifling existence. Yu delivers another intimate, intricate performance." - Booklist
"A lot is unexplained in Ghost Music, and at times it's not clear where the novel is going. However, among Yu's many illuminating descriptions of music, one hints at a central idea ... This is an intriguing book that knits together music and life to touch on something profound." - The Observer (UK)
"A frustrated piano teacher gains some much-needed clarity and perspective in An Yu's novel Ghost Music ... Juxtaposing unreal imagery and distinctive prose with very human characters, Ghost Music is a novel about learning to cope with lost dreams and missed opportunities." - Foreword Reviews
"Often stunning. [Yu's] turns of phrase are simple yet wonderful ... Mixes the real and the surreal, blurring dreamworlds and the everyday ... Transporting, searching, and poetic, Yu's weird, mutated storytelling wonderfully marries mundane and deep existential dilemmas." - The List (UK)
"An Yu's lush, delicate novel Ghost Music unfolds like Claude Debussy's atmospheric piece for solo piano Rêverie, 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, USA Today-bestselling author of The Weight of a Piano
"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, author of The Margot Affair
"Dreamlike and diurnal, haunted and lucid, ambivalent and hopeful, An Yu's Ghost Music pulses with profound mystery. A disquieting, mesmerizing novel." - Sara Freeman, author of Tides
"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, author of Brother Alive
This information about Ghost Music was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
An Yu is the author of Braised Pork and Ghost Music. She was born and raised in Beijing and left at the age of eighteen to study in New York City. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she writes her fiction in English and lives in Hong Kong.
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