the music room - Hardcover

McFarland, Dennis

3.51

961 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333539486 ISBN 13: 9780333539484

Publisher: Macmillan, 1990

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In an incredible novel of devastating beauty, Martin Lambert must come to terms with the aftermath of his brother's suicide. Replaying sad melodies of his affluent youth, Martin embarks on a poignant journey through his family's haunted past--an unforgettable voyage of self-discovery that leads him from a childhood tainted by shocking parental abuse to a present clouded by alcoholic despair and desperate love - and, ultimately, toward a future of understanding, redemption and hope.

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About the Author:

Dennis McFarland is an award-winning author, whose novels include School For The Blind, A Face at the Window and his latest novel Singing Boy. He lives near Boston with his wife and two children.

From Publishers Weekly:

McFarland extracts sweetly sad, haunting music from a family's dysfunction in this debut novel. Cellist Martin Lambert owns a San Francisco record company. His wife Madeline is divorcing him for another man, and his brother Perry, a composer, has just committed suicide in New York. Flying there to dig out the reasons for Perry's death, Martin falls in love with his brother's pregnant ex-girlfriend, Jane Owlcaster, a choral conductor. Their affair is a mutual strategy to block the process of grieving. Through flashbacks, dream transcripts and trips to the family's Virginia estate, we meet Martin's alcoholic, widowed mother, who for years served as an "enabler" for another compulsive drinker: Martin's father, a failed concert pianist. Memories are exorcised--the day the house nearly burned down, father drinking himself to death, skeletons in the family closet. Martin's first-person quest to reorder his own drifting life at times slips into preciosity, but overall the musical, highly nuanced prose carries the story. First serial to the New Yorker ; film rights to Guber-Peters.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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