Books
 

GHOST VARIATIONS
The strangest detective story in music, based on real events

(Unbound, 2016, £9.99 paperback, £3.99 e-book)
ISBN (e-book): 978-1-78352-983-4
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-78352-982-7

"In this splendid new novel Jessica Duchen manages to find the fine balance between facts and fiction. Her book reads like a thriller, yet it's also a tribute to great music and musicians"
- Sir András Schiff

London, 1933. Dabbling in the once-fashionable “Glass Game” – a Ouija board – the famous Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi is amazed to receive a message supposedly from the spirit of the great composer Robert Schumann, asking her to find and play his long-suppressed violin concerto.

Jelly, formerly muse to many composers, hesitates to pursue this strange summons, eager to devote herself to charity concerts for the unemployed of the Depression. But soon her sister Adila and her friend Erik Palmstierna, both avid spiritualists, hear of the incident and the die is cast. Having lost her first love in World War I and now facing the death of another close friend, Jelly sets out to find not only a missing concerto, but also a form of redemption.

But news of the concerto’s existence spreads to Berlin, where the manuscript is held, and the higher echelons of the Third Reich quickly conceive of a propaganda use for the work. Jelly, trapped in a race to the first performance, must confront forces that threaten her own state of mind.

Facing a world slipping into the insanity of fascism and war and the prospect of her own life and career sliding out of control, for Jelly saving the concerto comes to mean saving herself.





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Read a first review of
Songs of Triumphant Love
here

SONGS OF TRIUMPHANT LOVE
(Hodder&Stoughton 2009, £19.99 hardback - £7.99 paperback)
both, Hardback and Paperback are published on 9 July 2009

While the celebrated opera singer Teresa Ivory is in hospital, facing what could be the end of her career, her daughter Julie stumbles upon a long-buried secret that forces her to question her past and her place in her mother's affection.

In their cracked and empty house that no longer seems like a home, mother and daughter try to keep their closeness to each other and to the men they love: damaged Teo, the writer, adopted Parisian and survivor from Bosnia, whose passion for Terri borders on the self-destructive; and Julie's first love, Alistair, who fails to predict the consequences of his decision to join the army.

When calamity strikes, all four must make vital choices to find their way forward. Can love and music heal when medicine cannot? And are there some secrets that should never be shared?

SONGS is Jessica Duchen's fourth novel, a story of love, lies and family ties set in a world ranging from fractured and divisive contemporary London to damaged and recovering Mostar. As Terri faces the prospect of losing her voice, Julie tries to discover one of her own; while Teo battles with the effects of his experiences in Bosnia, Alistair plunges into army life in Afghanistan. This strange quartet - a family that isn't a family - moves in counterpoint across one transformative year. But can songs and love triumph against all the odds?

 


HUNGARIAN DANCES
Hodder & Stoughton, 2008,
£19.99 hardback - £7.99 paperback

When disaster befalls her best friend, Karina feels compelled to question the very foundations of her existence. Born in Britain to Hungarian parents, wife to a very English husband and mother of a young son descended on one side from the lord of the manor and on the other from a dynasty of wandering minstrels, Karina feels she belongs in neither one world nor the other. But Rohan, a fellow violinist and fan of her own grandmother, encourages her to delve into her Hungarian family background and her Gypsy ancestry. Her discoveries will change her life forever.

Past and present collide in the intertwining stories of Karina and her grandmother, the celebrated violinist Mimi Rácz. Love and loss, displacement and continuity mingle in a moving panorama that spans eighty years and is permeated by the family’s one constant: the sound of the violin.

Hungarian Dances is a love story, a mystery and a tale of extraordinary personal transformation.

Read the first three pages of "Hungarian Dances " here
 
 
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Jessica's website for Hungarian Dances
Link to Jessica's
Hungarian Dances website


"A great love story and mystery set in – among other things – the world of Hungarian gypsies and passionate musicians. Duchen has a rare talent which is increasingly being recognised."- Gavin Esler, The Glasgow Herald
After having read Rites of Spring, I am now equally thrilled by Hungarian Dances. Jessica Duchen is a very gifted storyteller; her characters are sensitively portrayed. She has observed "Hungarianness" very well indeed. And her understanding of the tragedy and sufferings of the Gypsy people - that is not just history, but very much a problem of our time - gives this book an even more profound meaning. - András Schiff
"The pages of Hungarian Dances just kept turning! Like all the best novels, it asks unexpected and compelling questions. It's a book for anyone with an interest in how history leaves its mark on people and how they in turn come to live with its scars."- Martin Davies, author, The Conjuror's Bird


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ALICIA’S GIFT
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2007, £19.99 hardback)

When does a dream become an obsession? And whose dream is it anyway?
Alicia Bradley, aged three, sits down at the family piano and plays with both hands, by ear, in the right key, a piece she’s just heard at nursery school. Her family, seeking a quiet life in Derbyshire, doesn’t know what’s hit them. Alicia’s dad, Guy, plays the piano himself, but only for fun. Alicia’s mum, Kate, had wanted to become a musician, but her parents forbade it. As it becomes clear that they’ve got a prodigy on their hands, Kate’s determined to give Alicia every chance to succeed, but Guy laments his daughter’s lost childhood; and Alicia’s brother, Adrian, sidelined amid the fracas, becomes a tearaway who can see matters more clearly than all the others put together. It’s only Alicia, an affectionate, straightforward girl who loves to go running with her dog, who doesn’t seem to get a say in things…

As Alicia grows up, everyone wants a piece of the Peak District Prodigy. Alicia has several lifelines: her dog, Cassie; her friend Anjali, a young Indian pianist; her sympathetic agent; and, possibly, a boy from Bloomington. But amid a warring family, unscrupulous teachers and the constant pressures of practising, concerts and competitions, will she ever be allowed a real life of her own?

Read the first three pages of "Alicia's Gift " here





RITES OF SPRING
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2006, £18.99 hardback)
When does a free spirit become a lost soul? Adam and Sasha have a teenage daughter, small twin boys, a pleasant home in south-west London and apparently fulfilling careers. But when Adam cracks under grief after his mother's death, resigns from his job and breaks a longstanding promise to Sasha, family communication begins to crumble and collapse. Sasha desperately tries to juggle her high-flying career with managing the energetic twins; her sister, Lisa, a musicologist specialising in Stravinsky, adores the children but suffers in an unsatisfactory long-distance relationship with a concert pianist; and Adam is battling many lost dreams of his own.
Liffy, aged 13, is caught between the household tensions and her dreams of becoming a ballet dancer. Her imaginary guide, whom she names 'the Earth Prince', seems to encourage her to stay clear, stay light, stay in control; and her aunt Lisa takes her to see the ballet The Rite of Spring in which a young girl dances herself to death, sacrificed to save her tribe. As Liffy's world implodes, the whole family must make sacrifices before it's too late…


Read the first three pages of "Rites of Spring" here



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FAURÉ - Order from Amazon
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GABRIEL FAURÉ
(Phaidon Press, 2000, £14.99)
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) is, for me, the most elusive and enchanting voice in the music of fin-de-siècle France. Composer, pianist, professor to such figures as Ravel, Enescu and Nadia Boulanger and director of the Paris Conservatoire, Fauré struggled to find enough time to compose. Quietly independent, he went his own artistic way, preferring intimate genres, avoiding the influence of Wagner and seeking inspiration instead in music as diverse as Gregorian chant, Schumann, Chopin and his lifelong mentor, Saint-Saëns. He knew many of the great artistic figures of his day, including the writers Ivan Turgenev and Marcel Proust, the singer Pauline Viardot, the poet Paul Verlaine and composers as diverse as Tchaikovsky, Debussy and Elgar; and after his marriage turned sour, his love affairs were legion. Ever youthful in spirit, despite the deafness that blighted his old age, he never ceased exploring new musical worlds.

Fauré remains one of my greatest musical passions. I am eternally seduced by his subtlety, his ineffable sense of beauty and poetry, his double meanings, the way he veils his deeply passionate and sensual nature with a veneer of French 'pudeur'. This book offers a straightforward account for general music lovers of his life and work.

INSIDE LONDON
(Lund Humphries, 2000, £32.50)
Dorothy Bohm, a fabulous photographer and a family friend for decades, invited me to write the text for her highly individual portrait of contemporary London. She wanted not a conventional essay, but an exploration involving creativity, imagination, a response to her artistic vision and the direct experience of living in this melting pot of a metropolis. I feel honoured to be involved in this beautiful book.

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ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD - Order from Amazon
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ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD
(Phaidon Press, 1996, £14.99)
The extraordinary life of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) moves from his childhood as a Viennese wunderkind composer, through the traumatic years leading up to the Second World War and into exile in Hollywood where he composed film music for Warner Brothers. Cursed with a powerful music critic for a father - a relationship second in difficulty only to that of Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Korngold struggled all his life for emotional and artistic independence, not always successfully. This biography offers an accessible and readable introduction to his life and amazing work.

I fell in love with Korngold's music when I heard his opera Die tote Stadt for the first time. Everything he composed, however, is filled with a warm, overflowing, generous spirit. I still love him most for his imperfections: he has the guts to risk absolutely everything and occasionally lose.