Winner of Scotland's Saltire Prize for Best First Novel, Music, in a Foreign Language is a layered, deeply affecting exploration of friendship, betrayal, the nature of fiction, and the meaning of history.
Set in an imaginary police state in contemporary Britain, the novel explores the complex relationship between two men, Charles King and Robert Waters, a physicist and a historian who share a secret history of political and sexual dimensions. As young men, King and Waters had briefly copublished an underground magazine called Flood. Years later, long-concealed copies of the magazine become important in a state investigation that will pit one man against the other
As the novel's narrator unfolds the tale, he reveals pieces of his life. A man with an incomplete past and an uncertain future, he writes and reads in search of his own history. Like the melody and counterpoint of a fugue, the past story of King and Waters is augmented by the narrator's autobiography, until both movements inevitably join across time in a conclusion of startling power.
Drawing together his variations into a grand theme, Andrew Crumey weaves music, physics, history, philosophy, and fiction together with an unforgettable human drama.
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An intriguing and illuminating post-modern meditation on betrayal, death, and paths not taken, both personal and historical. Employing fiction within a fiction, Crumey constructs a philosophical jigsaw puzzle." The Herald
"This intricate, demanding story of political and personal commitment and betrayal introduces a young master of postmodernist irony who will remind many readers of the brainier postwar European novelists. A formidable debut, from a writer whose possibilities, seem virtually unlimited." Kirkus
"Music in a Foreign Language used the brilliant conceit of a Britain just emerging from 40 years of polite Stalinism as a platform for some glittering intellectual fireworks." Boyd Tonkin in The New Statesman
Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He studied theoretical physics and mathematics at St. Andrews University and Imperial College, and did postdoctoral research at Leeds University in nonlinear dynamics. His second novel, Pfitz, is available from Picador. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.
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