Captivating and hypnotic English-language debut from a Welsh novelist, deftly imagining the lost months of a jazz giant and the noir feel of 1960s New York music scene
New York, June 1961: the Bill Evans Trio, featuring 25 year old Scott LaFaro on bass, play a series of concerts at the Village Vanguard that will go down in musical history. Shortly afterwards, LaFaro is killed in a car accident, and Evans disappears. This novel the story of what happens next. In measured, evocative prose, it takes a period from the life of one of America's great artists and fashions it into a fiction of extraordinary imaginative skill and ambition. The story inhabits the lives of four people in orbit around a tragedy, presenting an intense and moving portrait of the burden of grief, and of a man lost to his family and to himself. It is also a conjuring of a pivotal moment in American music and culture, and a unique representation of the jazz scene in the early 1960s.
Intermission
is a novel of pure control and power, sure to find fans in readers of Marilynne Robinson and Paul Harding.