Simultaneously a touching human story, a meditation on art and science, and a primer on Beethoven's life and work, Andrew Crumey's ninth novel skilfully weaves history, music, erudition and humour in a page-turning mystery that will resonate in the reader's mind long afterwards. A lost opera and a dark conspiracy lie at the heart of this philosophical comedy which views Beethoven through the eyes of multiple characters across time, linked by strange events at a rambling country house. Nowadays a retreat for artists, scientists and researchers, the house was formerly an asylum with a clairvoyant inmate, and before that, a location for esoteric experiments. As labyrinthine as the architecture is a plot whose themes include Crusader legends and 1920s literary London, mesmerism and freemasonry, psychoanalysis and theosophy. Holding everything together is a present-day scholar whose pandemic disasters propel him into the byways of history and towards an untimely demise. AUTHOR: Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research at Leeds University on nonlinear dynamics. After six years as the literary editor at Scotland on Sunday he now combines teaching creative writing at Northumbria University with his writing.
