24 Musical Novels: Classical Music Fiction
If you’re looking for a novel with a classical music theme to get stuck into, you’re in the right place. Each book is listed below, alongside their rating on Goodreads and a link to buy the book from Bookshop.org, Waterstones or Blackwell’s, or the audio book on Audible. You’ll find many more in our new online musical bookshop, hosted on Bookshop.org. Any novels bought using the links below or through the shop support us and also support local, independent bookshops around the UK. Thank you, and happy reading!
Imogen Crimp, 2022 (3.6/5 on Goodreads)
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Anna is struggling to afford life in London as she trains to be an opera singer. During the day, she vies to succeed against her course mates with their discreet but inexhaustible streams of cultural capital and money, and in the evening she sings jazz at a bar in the City to make ends meet. It's there that she meets Max, a financier 14 years older than her. Over the course of one winter, Anna's intoxication oscillates between her hard-won moments on stage, where she can zip herself into the skin of her characters, and nights spent with Max in his glass-walled flat overlooking the city. But Anna's fledgling career demands her undivided attention, and increasingly - whether he necessarily wills it or not - so does Max...
James Runcie, 2022 (3.9/5 on Goodreads)
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Leipzig, 1726. 11-year-old Stefan Silbermann, a humble organ-maker's son, has just lost his mother. Sent to Leipzig to train as a singer in the St Thomas Church choir, he struggles to stay afloat in a school where the teachers are as casually cruel as the students.
Stefan's talent draws the attention of the Cantor - Johann Sebastian Bach. Eccentric, obsessive and kind, he rescues Stefan from the miseries of school by bringing him into his home as an apprentice. Soon Stefan feels that this ferociously clever, chaotic family is his own. But when tragedy strikes, Stefan's period of sanctuary in their household comes to a close.
Rachel Joyce, 2017 (3.8/5 on Goodreads)
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It's 1988. Frank owns a music shop. Classical, jazz, punk - as long as it's vinyl, he sells it. Day after day, Frank finds his customers the music they need. Then into his life walks Ilse, who asks Frank to teach her about music. His instinct is to turn and run, and yet he is drawn to this mysterious woman. But Ilse is not what she seems. And Frank has old wounds that threaten to reopen and a past he will never leave behind.
From the author of the worldwide bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a novel about learning how to listen and how to feel and choosing to be brave despite the odds. Because in the end, music can save us all....
Eleanor Catton, 2010 (3.4/5 on Goodreads)
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When news spreads of a music teacher's relationship with his student, participants and observers alike soon take part in an elaborate show of concern. But beneath the surface of the girls' display, there simmers a new awareness of their own power. They obsessively examine the details of the affair with the curiosity, jealousy and approbation native to any adolescent girl, under the watchful eye of their stern saxophone teacher, whose focus may not be as strictly on their upcoming recital as she implies.
The Rehearsal was authored by Eleanor Catton, the youngest winner of the Booker Prize (for The Luminaries in 2013, which has since been made into a BBC series). The Rehearsal was shortlisted for The Guardian First Book Award.
Ann Patchett, 2002 (3.9/5 Goodreads)
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Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honour of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerised the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening –until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage.
A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of the Orange Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award.
Anna Hope, 2016 (3.8/5 on Goodreads)
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1911: Inside an asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire moors, where men and women are kept apart by high walls and barred windows, there is a ballroom vast and beautiful. For one bright evening every week they come together for ‘musical therapy’ and dancing, led by bandmaster and head of music Dr Charles Fuller. When John and Ella meet it is a dance that will change two lives forever. This poignant story casts an unflinching gaze at the historic treatment of mental health disorders, to a .soundtrack of Bach, Chopin, Schubert, Strauss and Beethoven.
Richard Powers, 2004 (4.2/5 on Goodreads)
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Jonah, Ruth and Joseph are the children of mixed-race parents determined to raise them beyond time, beyond identity, steeped in song. Yet they cannot be protected from the world forever. Even as Jonah becomes a successful young tenor, the opera arena remains fixated on his race. Ruth turns her back on classical music and disappears, dedicating herself to activism and a new relationship. As the years pass, Joseph - the middle child, a pianist and our narrator - must battle not just to remain connected to his siblings, but to forge a future of his own.
Helena Attlee, 2021 (3.9/5 Goodreads)
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From the moment she hears Lev's violin for the first time, Helena Attlee is captivated. She is told that it is an Italian instrument, named after its former Russian owner. Eager to discover all she can about its ancestry and the stories contained within its delicate wooden body, she sets out for Cremona, birthplace of the Italian violin. This is the beginning of a beguiling journey whose end she could never have anticipated.
Lev's Violin takes us from the heart of Italian culture to its very furthest reaches. Its story of luthiers and scientists, princes and orphans, musicians, composers, travellers and raconteurs swells to a poignant meditation on the power of objects, stories and music to shape individual lives and to craft entire cultures.
Elfriede Jelinek, 1983 (3.6/5 on Goodreads)
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One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Best Books by Women. Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. By night she trawls the city's porn shows while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her. Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies' man Walter Klemmer. With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction. A haunting tale of morbid voyeurism and masochism, The Piano Teacher, first published in 1983, is Elfreide Jelinek's Masterpiece. Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize For Literature in 2004 for her 'musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power. The Piano Teacher was adapted into an internationally successful film by Michael Haneke in 2001, which won three major prizes at Cannes.
Patrick Gale, 2019 (4.1/5 on Goodreads)
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1970s Weston-Super-Mare and 10-year-old oddball Eustace, an only child, has life transformed by his mother's quixotic decision to sign him up for cello lessons. Music-making brings release for a boy who is discovering he is an emotional volcano. He laps up lessons from his young teacher, not noticing how her brand of glamour is casting a damaging spell over his frustrated and controlling mother. When he is enrolled in holiday courses in the Scottish borders, lessons in love, rejection and humility are added to daily practice.
Drawing in part on his own boyhood, Patrick Gale's new novel explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives.
Isabel Rogers, 2019 (4/5 on Goodreads)
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Classical music can be a dangerous pastime… What with love affairs, their conductor dropping dead, a stolen cello and no money, Stockwell Park Orchestra is having a fraught season. There is one way to survive, but is letting a tone-deaf diva sing Strauss too high a price to pay? And will Stockwell Park Orchestra live to play another season?
This is the first novel from poet and cellist Isabel Rogers. She has gone on to write two further novels in the Stockwell Park Orchestra series: Bold as Brass,Continental Riff and The Prize Racket.
"I was charmed... a very enjoyable read." (Marian Keyes)
Blair Tindall, 2005 (3.3/5 on Goodreads)
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Professional oboist Blair Tindall reveals the secret life of musicians, who trade sex and drugs for low-paying gigs and the promise of winning a rare symphony position or a lucrative solo recording contract, in this behind-the-scenes look at what goes on backstage and in the Broadway pit.
The book has been made into a popular TV series, available on Amazon Prime. For more watching recommendations, go to 10 Classical Music Films/TV Series on Netflix & Prime.
Madeleine Thien, 2017 (3.9/5 on Goodreads)
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Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations—those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the centre of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences.
This novel was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016.
Vikram Seth, 1999 (3.8/5 on Goodreads)
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Music student Michael falls in love with pianist Julia. They play together in a string trio, but when Michael has a nervous breakdown, he abruptly leaves Vienna – and Julia – without warning. When he tries to contact her again, he gets no reply. 10 years later, still in love with her, he meets her again in London when she attends a concert he is giving with his string quartet.
A tour de force of poetic, impassioned writing from the author of international bestseller A Suitable Boy, An Equal Music is an unforgettable tale about love, music and how the love of music can run like a passionate fugue through a life.
Patrick Gale, 1985 (3.6/5 on Goodreads)
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Seth, a musical prodigy on the eve of his 16th birthday, is obsessed with sex and with the men he might meet, as well as with his strange family - his arch mother, his beautiful sister, and his damaged, distant father.
Mo, a policewoman struggling with moral dilemmas and her sexuality in the violent, bigoted police force of the 1980s, wants only to find romance.
In this haunting tale of self discovery and hidden identities, Mo and Seth will connect to face unexpected truths about themselves, and those they have chosen to love.
Janice Y.K. Lee, 2009 (3.3/5 on Goodreads)
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In the sweeping tradition of The English Patient, Janice Y.K. Lee's debut novel is a tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong Kong. In 1942, Englishman Will Truesdale falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong to work as a piano teacher and also begins a fateful affair. As the threads of this spellbinding novel intertwine, impossible choices emerge-between love and safety, courage and survival, the present, and above all, the past.
T E Carhart, 2001 (4/5 on Goodreads)
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An American living in Paris is intrigued by a piano repair shop hidden down a street near his apartment. When he finally gains admittance to the secretive world of the atelier, he finds himself in an enormous glass-roofed workshop filled with dozens of pianos. His love affair with this most magical of instruments and its music is reawakened. Packed with delicate cameos of Parisians and reflections on how pianos work and their glorious history, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is an atmospheric and absorbing journey to an older way of life.
Jessie Tu, 2020 (3.3/5 on Goodreads)
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Violinist Jena Lin was once a child prodigy and now uses sex to fill the void left by fame. Her professional life comprises rehearsals, concerts, auditions and relentless practice; her personal life is spent managing the demands of her strict family and those of her creative friends, and hooking up. And then she meets Mark – much older and worldly wise – who consumes her. But at what cost to her dreams?
A Lonely Girl Is a Dangerous Thing explores female desire and the consequences of wanting too much and never getting it. It’s about the awkwardness of being human in an increasingly dislocated world – and how, in spite of all this, we still try to become the person we want to be.
Steven Galloway, 2009 (4/5 on Goodreads)
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Snipers in the hills overlook the shattered streets of Sarajevo. Knowing that the next bullet could strike at any moment, the ordinary men and women below strive to go about their daily lives as best they can. Kenan faces the agonizing dilemma of crossing the city to get water for his family. Dragan, gripped by fear, does not know who among his friends he can trust. And Arrow, a young woman counter-sniper must push herself to the limits - of body and soul, fear and humanity.
Told with immediacy, grace and harrowing emotional accuracy, The Cellist of Sarajevo shows how, when the everyday act of crossing the street can risk lives, the human spirit is revealed in all its fortitude - and frailty.
Gone
Min Kym, 2018 (3.9/5 on Goodreads)
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A true story. At 7 years old Min Kym was a prodigy, the youngest ever pupil at the Purcell School of Music. At 11 she won her first international prize. She worked with many violins, waiting for the day she would play 'the one'. At 21 she found it: a rare 1696 Stradivarius, perfectly suited to her build and temperament. Her career soared. She recorded the Brahms concerto and a world tour was planned. Then, in a train station cafe, her violin was stolen. In an instant her world collapsed. She descended into a terrifying limbo land, unable to play another note.
This is Min's extraordinary story - of a young woman staring into the void, wondering who she was, who she had been. It is a story of isolation and dependence, of love, loss and betrayal, and the intense, almost human bond that a musician has with their instrument. Above all it's a story of hope through a journey back to music.
Andromeda Romano-Lax, 2009 (3.7/5 on Goodreads)
Waterstones / Blackwell’s
When Feliu Delargo is born, late-19th-century Spain is a nation slipping from international power and struggling with its own fractured identity, caught between the chaos of post-empire and impending Civil War. Feliu's troubled childhood and rise to fame lead him into a thorny partnership with an even more famous and eccentric figure, the piano prodigy Justo Al-Cerraz. The two musicians' divergent artistic goals and political inclinations threaten to divide them as Spain plunges into Civil War. But as Civil War turns to World War, shared love for their trio partner – an Italian violinist named Aviva – forces them into their final and most dangerous collaboration.
Sophy Roberts, 2021 (4/5 on Goodreads)
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Siberia's story is traditionally one of exiles, penal colonies and unmarked graves. Yet there is another tale to tell.
Dotted throughout this remote land are pianos - grand instruments created during the boom years of the 19th century, and humble, Soviet-made uprights that found their way into equally modest homes. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos travelled into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is testament to noble acts of fortitude by governors, adventurers and exiles. That stately instruments might still exist in such a hostile landscape is remarkable. That they are still capable of making music in far-flung villages is nothing less than a miracle.
But this is Siberia, where people can endure the worst of the world - and where music reveals a deep humanity in the last place on earth you would expect to find it.
Leonora Carrington, 2005 (4/5 on Goodreads)
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A classic of fantastic literature,The Hearing Trumpet is the occult twin to Alice in Wonderland.
One of the first things 92-year-old Marian Leatherby overhears when she is given an ornate hearing trumpet is her family plotting to commit her to an institution. Soon, she finds herself trapped in a sinister retirement home, where the elderly must inhabit buildings shaped like igloos and birthday cakes, endure twisted religious preaching and eat in a canteen overlooked by the mysterious portrait of a leering Abbess. But when another resident secretly hands Marian a book recounting the life of the Abbess, a joyous and brilliantly surreal adventure begins to unfold. Written in the early 1960s, The Hearing Trumpet remains one of the most original and inspirational of all fantastic novels.
Howard Jay Smith, 2020 (4.⅗ Goodreads)
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A novel drawn from the secret diaries of Lorenzo Da Ponte. This is a deftly plotted and richly detailed historical novel that spans generations and involves Mozart, mysteries, masquerades, opera, and spies. It brings to light the incredible life story of Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, the Jewish-born priest who created The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte. According to one reviewer, Meeting Mozart is “the musical equivalent of The Da Vinci Code.” This is the follow-up novel to Howard Jay Smith’s award-winning novel, Beethoven in Love; Opus 139.
Hannah Fiddy is a creative entrepreneur, developing new audiences for classical music. She has created and promoted numerous concerts outside of traditional spaces, including warehouses, pubs, clubs, museums, hospitals, prisons and even in Primark. Hannah is also an interviewer, writer and guest lecturer, and runs the Avon Chamber Choir in Bristol. In a past life she founded London Flashmob, producing quirky events from wedding proposals to cultural pranks for up to 1,000 people.
Follow Hannah on Twitter @Hannah_Fiddy.