For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. With her marriage, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her desire to have a child.
Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her long-buried family secrets. Soon strange parcels start to show up on the doorstep and Song Yan's dreams become troubling and claustrophobic. Striking out alone through the winter city, she finds herself pulled into the ancient hutongs to confront the source of her unease.
In a silent room within a timeless house, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of all the pain and beauty in her life?
Published by Harvill Secker (2022) and Grove Atlantic (2023)
“With its quiet, dreamy bending of reality and its precise depiction of many different strains of alienation, “Ghost Music” is an evocative exploration of what it means to live fully — and the potential consequences of failing to do so...Yu conjures a visceral in-betweenness where the worlds of matter and spirit meet in a shared, suspended space.”
“An atmospheric study in disconnected relationships . . . In order to live, prodded by talking mushrooms, [an] elusive prodigy, and finally, the music, Song Yan will need to escape her stifling existence. Yu delivers another intimate, intricate performance.”
“The story at the centre of Ghost Music revolves around the struggles of living with an elderly inlaw, the collapse of a marriage, and more generally the pressures on women to be doting wives in Chinese society. However, these themes are explored in such an unusual way that it doesn’t read like a domestic novel; throughout there is the uncanny sense of something odd, verging on supernatural, going on in the background . . . An intriguing book that knits together music and life to touch on something profound”
“Yu mesmerizes with this surreal story of music and mushrooms . . . As Song Yan relentlessly surges toward independence and away from solitude and loneliness, Yu’s blistering narrative reaches a plaintive end. Readers will be enthralled.”
“Enthralling and elegant, Ghost Music conjures a world I have never seen before: dreamlike, mysterious, suspenseful in the secrets it reveals, while always being grounded in the sensory. The narrator’s wise sensibility drew me in, but I stayed for the sentences—each one more astonishing than the next, they revealed an extraordinary depth of feeling. Like a Ryuichi Sakamoto composition, this novel casts a haunting spell.”
“To read Ghost Music’s spare prose is to discover its cogency. Yu allows our quiet manias to grow apace with her staggering imagination. An Yu’s second novel affirms her as one of our most important writers.”
“Dreamlike and diurnal, haunted and lucid, ambivalent and hopeful, An Yu’s Ghost Music pulses with profound mystery. A disquieting, mesmerizing novel.”
“An Yu’s lush, delicate novel Ghost Music unfolds like Claude Debussy’s atmospheric piece for solo piano Rêverie, lulling the reader into protagonist Song Yan’s surrealistic daydream of a life. As the former pianist and young wife confronts the stark reality of her marriage with suppressed but deeply felt emotions, she begins to test the limits of her freedom and finds that like the mysterious mushrooms that appear in the mail and in her dreams, she, too, may thrive in darkness.”