MUSIC AND FREEDOM

I have no use for forgiveness, not yet. But other ideas like that,
kindness, for example, I think that is fundamental. Resurrection;
I like that too. And love, of course, love, love, love.

Alice Murray learns to play the piano aged three on an orange orchard in rural Australia. Recognising her daughter’s gift, her mother sends Alice to boarding school in the bleak north of England, and there Alice stays for the rest of her childhood. Then she’s offered a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, and on a summer school in Oxford she meets Edward, an economics professor who sweeps her off her feet.

Alice soon finds that Edwards is damaged, and she’s trapped. She clings to her playing and to her dream of becoming a concert pianist, until disaster strikes. Increasingly isolated as the years unravel, eventually Alice can’t find it in herself to carry on. Then she hears a single piano note emerge, repeatedly, from the walls of her house. And then that note turns into music…

This novel’s love story is that of a woman who must embrace life again if she is to survive. Inspiring and compelling, it explores the dark terrain of violence and the transformative powers of music and love.

Music and Freedom is the winner of the 2017 ALS Gold Medal for ‘a work of outstanding literary merit’, the winner of the 2016 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, was named iBooks 2016 Australian Fiction Book of the Year, and was short-listed for a 2017 Australian Book Industry Award, The Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year.