IN THIS COLLECTION of short stories, the acclaimed author of Gerontius, a fictional account of Elgar’s journey to the Amazon, offers fables and fictions on creativity, tradition and loss. A love of music unites these stories, and each in its different way has a musical theme.
An escaped lunatic who thinks he is Schumann interrupts a quiet family picnic and introduces a crazy note to the life of a child; a young Croat refugee, whose only remaining bond of trust or civility is his ability to play the guitar, enters and disturbs a woman’s life; and in a lovely parable of the relationship between innovation and tradition, a Chinese master instructs his pupil in the music of nature and an unchanging corpus of tunes, but the pupil betrays him by wanting to add to nature and write his own. The paranoias of censorship and abstruse scholarship are mocked together in a comic story about the composer in a ‘workers’ state’ whose task it is to decode hidden subversion in the new national anthem.
This is a brilliant sequence which will confirm Hamilton-Paterson’s reputation as a writer of diverse gifts.

JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON’s most recent novel, Ghosts of Manila (published in paperback by Vintage), was shortlisted for the Whitbread Fiction Prize. His work has been published in many languages.