Trumpet - Softcover

Jackie Kay

4.06

6,570 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330511823 ISBN 13: 9780330511827

Publisher: Picador, 2011

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The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village. A novel about the lengths to which people will go for love, "Trumpet" is a moving story of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, of loving deception and lasting devotion, and of the intimate workings of the human heart. 'Jackie Kay makes the unbelievable gloriously real. "Trumpet" is a love story and a lament, beautifully told' - "Time Out". 'The voices in this tender, compassionate work were still singing in my head a couple of weeks after I'd finished it' - "Observer". 'This book is all about love ...The qualities of sympathy and tenderness in the novel make it special and make Kay a writer to respect' - "Guardian".

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Review:

"It was our secret. That's all it was. Lots of people have secrets, don't they? The world runs on secrets. What kind of place would the world be without them? Our secret was harmless. It did not hurt anybody."

The secret that Millicent Moody, widow of jazz great Joss Moody, refers to may have been harmless in life, but when Joss dies and the truth is exposed, it ends up affecting more people than she ever imagined. It gives nothing away to reveal right off that Millicent's late husband was, in fact, a woman--something Millie has known all along but that the Moodys' adopted son, Colman, only discovers after his father's death. Titillating as the subject matter initially seems, in Jackie Kay's capable hands Joss's gender-bending becomes almost a side issue in a novel that is, at its heart, concerned with the essential nature of love.

Kay tells her story from many different perspectives--the doctor who signs the death certificate, the mortician who prepares the body, the opportunistic biographer looking to make a buck and a name for herself, the musicians who knew Joss--but it is Millicent and Colman who bear the brunt of both the pain and the responsibility for telling the tale. Millie Moody is a tremendously sympathetic character; her love for Joss is so powerful, so right that the reader never questions the decisions this odd couple made in life. "I didn't feel like I was living a lie," Millie tells us. "I felt like I was living a life." Colman, on the other hand, is more difficult to like. Though it's easy to understand his anger and confusion upon suddenly learning that the man he regarded as his father for 30 years was actually a woman, one also has the sneaking suspicion that he wasn't a particularly lovable guy before the revelation, either. Still, by the end of Trumpet, there's hope for Colman, peace of mind for Millie, and a satisfying rendering of love in all its permutations for the reader. --Alix Wilber

From the Publisher:

Kay spins a love story, a fairy tale and a psychological thriller out of one deep secret. She has a great gift for delving inside sundry souls, making poetry of their quirks. At its best, her prose ripples like jazz, and brims with exquisite insights.
-- Andrea Ashworth, author of Once in a House on Fire

"It has a humanity and sympathy which engaged me from start to finish. And its energy and directness made it a treat to read. . . .Her book [makes] us see that people apparently very unlike ourselves are in fact very much like ourselves. . . Love is not usually such a triumphant idea in modern writing, but I think Jackie Kay makes it believably and vividly so."
-- Ian Jack, Granta

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