Synopses & Reviews
In his first novel since Cal, here is a compact, luminous, and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art.
With superb artistry and startling intimacy, the celebrated Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna -- estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and a woman composer making her mark in a male-dominated field. On the remote island of Islay she struggles for her artistic life in the midst of a relationship gone dangerously wrong. In Glasgow she becomes a mother and later composes a largescale symphonic work to celebrate her child. And in her hometown in Northern Ireland she returns to bury a difficult father, forge a tentative peace with her mother, and confront the ghosts of a constricting past. Hers is, in part, a very modern spiritual journey from superstition to sensibility.
In Grace Notes the music of MacLaverty's prose and his harmonious vision of one woman's life combine to create a novel of great delicacy and tensile strength. It is a book that the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One's Own would instantly understand.