The Big Music

An old man, on the threshold of death, steals a new born baby into the hills and, in doing so, sets off a chain of reactions that will make him and those around him question the very meaning of family, truth, loyalty and love.

The Big Music tells the story of John Sutherland of The Grey House, a composer who is 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 through the notions of death and birth, change and stasis, the sound of his solitary story comes to merge and connect with those around him.

In this remarkable work of fiction, Kirsty Gunn has created something as real as music or as magical as a dream. One emerges at the end of it altered and changed. Not so much a novel as a place the reader comes to inhabit and know, as one might an art installation, The Big Music is a literary work of undeniable originality and power. Taking its cues from Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Katherine Mansfield, this is a piece of writing that pushes us to reevaluate our understanding of the narrative form.

Yet beyond its epic and ambitious form and structure, at the heart of The Big Music beats a love story, so secret and quiet it might be illicit, spanning two generations and as deep and meaningful as any classic romance or tragedy.

• ‘The Big Music is a landscape; a work of longing fragments that collect on a journey and grow to light lands before, around, and after them. Haunting and spacious.’ DBC Pierre

• ‘Like nothing else I’ve read.’ Adam Mars Jones

Kirsty Gunn is the author of four novels—Rain, The Keepsake, Featherstone and The Boy and the Sea—a collection of short stories, This Place you Return to is Home, and the non-fiction book, 44 Things. In 2004, she was awarded the Scottish Arts Council Bursary for Literature and in 2007 she won the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award for The Boy and the Sea. A regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines, she is also Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, where she established and directs the writing programme. She lives in London and Scotland with her husband and two daughters.

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  £13.59
  44 Things: A Year Of Life At Home
  Kirsty Gunn - Hardback - Atlantic
  'In 44 Things' Kirsty Gunn celebrates marriage, friendship and motherhood. She presents a mosaic of personal reflections written over the course of one year in moments stolen from the vibrant and chaotic world that inspired them.
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  £5.24
  The Boy And The Sea
  Kirsty Gunn - Paperback - Faber and Faber
  From the author of 'Rain' and 'Featherstone' comes a story of one sun-drenched, sea-soaked day when a boy's life is turned upside down.