Grace Andreacchi

'Music for Glass Orchestra' is an ambititous and remarkably successful book. It deals with history, music, architecture, love in many forms, human and divine, perfect and painfully incomplete. The novels' narrative structure is rich as well as complex and Andreacchi's prose is rich and truly poetic. The author's remarkable imagination and erudition are used to great advantage.

This book is a big favourite of mine - I don't know of anything quite like it. Sexy, yes, but also highly cerebral, and at the same time funny and witty. The author writes especially well about music, generating a music all her own through the remarkable prose.

This is a powerful book, filled with intense passion and painful sexual experience. Justine, the narrator, searches for love in likely and unlikely places, all described in a prose style that is both clear and poetic. There is a strong sense of place - Boston, Oxford, the Caribbean -and an even stronger sense of the painful ties of women and men.

I really like this book, although it is not an easy read. There's something truly gripping about the heroine's voyage into darkness and out again.