Grace Notes: A Novel

Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize The luminous novel by one of the finest living Irish writers, which Brian Moore has praised as "in every sense a triumph…moving throughout and ending triumphantly and joyously in its own special music." Grace Notes is a compact and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art. With superb artistry and startling intimacy, it brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna—estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and musician making her mark in a male-dominated world. It is a book that the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One's Own would instantly understand.