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Music against the night a novel

In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a young musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field, an awkward and sensitive child, is preternaturally gifted, and his family has visions of him becoming the next Mozart. His talent takes him far--to England, France, and then Russia, where he become...

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Main Author: Li, Yiyun, 1972- (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026.
Edition:First edition.
Subjects:
Musicians > Fiction.
Man-woman relationships > Fiction.
Dublin (Ireland) > 18th century > Fiction.
Historical fiction.
Coming-of-age fiction.
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Summary:In Dublin, as the eighteenth century nears its end, a young musical virtuoso comes of age. John Field, an awkward and sensitive child, is preternaturally gifted, and his family has visions of him becoming the next Mozart. His talent takes him far--to England, France, and then Russia, where he becomes a famous pianist and composes dreamy, languorous melodies that enchant the night air. John calls them nocturnes, but the prodigy who immortalizes them is Chopin. Oceans away in Pondicherry, in French India, Adelaide Percheron has a startling rise of her own. Orphaned at a young age, she is raised by her imperious, enterprising grandmother. Her cousins give her the name Percherette, an impish reminder that despite their shared relations, Adelaide is not one of the crowd, owing to her parents' differing ancestry. Without a connection to aristocracy or the luxury of riches, only marriage seems to offer prosperity--until she sets her sights on a pianoforte. Driven by her secret love of music and a desire to see the world, Percherette engineers her exodus, escaping to Paris and later to Moscow, as Napoleon's army sets out to conquer the continent.
Item Description:"Figures of the past find new life in Yiyun Li's thrillingly imagined saga following two musicians as they mature, study, travel, love, grieve, and, above all, chase their ambitions"-- Provided by publisher.
Physical Description:340 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN:9780374613051
0374613052
Author Notes:Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction-- Wednesday's Child ; The Book of Goose ; Must I Go ; Where Reasons End ; Kinder Than Solitude ; Gold Boy, Emerald Girl ; The Vagrants ; and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers --and the memoirs Things in Nature Merely Grow and Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life . She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Faulkner Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker , A Public Space , The Best American Short Stories , and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories , among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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