The Music - Softcover

A lunatic who thinks he is Schumann interrupts a family picnic; a Croatian refugee boy, whose one remaining link with people is his ability to play the guitar beautifully, enters and disturbs an Italian woman's life; a failed composer upstaged by a young rival with the same name eats his heart out in Algiers; the pupil of a master in a Chinese fable ruins a whole tradition by writing his own tunes. In the title story, Mozart returns to mock his admirers. Light, coruscating and learned stories.

James Hamilton-Paterson was educated at Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize. In addition to journalism for The Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, he has publushed poetry and two colections of short stories, The View from Mount Dog and his most recent work, The Music. The non-fiction work, Playing with Water, was followed by his first novel, Geronitus, which won a Whitbread Prize in 1989, and The Bell-Boy. On 1982 he published Seven Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds, a blend of literature and science exploring the sea. His novel Griefwork, published in 1993, was much acclaimed, and his most recent novel, Ghosts of Manila, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Ficiton Prize in 1994. He lives in Italy and the Phillipines.