Music Room

Dennis McFarland’s acclaimed debut novel, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “a rare pleasure . . . Remarkable from its beginning to its surprising, satisfying end”Musician Marty Lambert’s life is already falling apart when he receives the phone call that changes everything. His brother, Perry, has killed himself in New York, and Marty—with his marriage on the rocks and his record company sliding into insolvency—decides to leave San Francisco to investigate exactly what went wrong. His trip sends him headlong into the life his only brother left behind—his pleasures and disappointments, his friends, his lovely girlfriend, Jane—and finally, to the home they shared growing up in Virginia. Along the way, through memories and dreams, Marty relives their complicated upbringing as the children of talented, volatile musicians and alcoholics. Through the tragedy, Marty finally faces the demons of his past, ones he pretended he had buried long ago, to emerge on the other side of grief, toward solace and a more hopeful future.

“Reading The Music Room has given me enormous pleasure. Along the way would crop up sentences, sometimes merely a word, that would make me catch my breath. Writing out of a true fictional imagination seems so rare now. Readers who look for this and keep hoping for it have a discovery to make in The Music Room.” —Eudora Welty“I read The Music Room in a condition that can only be described as rapt. McFarland is the real thing, and this extraordinary book fills me with admiration. It’s the kind of book you press into people’s hands, telling them if they don’t read it you’ll never speak to them again.” —Frank Conroy“An amazing novel . . . Its precision of language and the haunting beauty of its figures are such as to be unforgettable.” —Walker Percy

Dennis McFarland is a bestselling author of novels and stories. His short fiction has appeared in the American Scholar, the New Yorker, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Best American Short Stories, and many other publications. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, where he has also taught creative writing. He lives in rural Vermont with his wife, writer and poet Michelle Blake.