Music, in a Foreign Language

The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound questions about the issues of motivation, choice and morality. The Sunday Times 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, partly a portrayal of an alternative, Eastern European-style post-war Britain, partly the story of the exiled narrator's life and of the characters in the novel he's writing. A promising debut from a talented and unusual writer. The Herald A writer more interested in inheriting the mantle of Perec and Kundera than Amis and Drabble. Like much of the most interesting British fiction around at the moment, Music, in a Foreign Language is being published in paperback by a small independent publishing house, giving hope that a tentative but long
overdue counter-attack is being mounted on the indelible conservatism of the modern English novel.With this novel he has begun his own small stand against cultural mediocrity, and to set himself up, like his hero, as ' a refugee from drabness. From tinned peas, and rain.' Jonathan Coe in The Guardian 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 New Statesman & Society 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, so to speak, seem virtually unlimited. Kirkus Reviews Music, in a Foreign Language won The Saltire Best First Book Award and launched the literary career of one of the UK's cleverest and most original post-modern novelists.