As she prepares dinner for her husband andtheir extended family, Suzanne hears on the radiothat a jetliner has crashed and her lover is dead.Alex Elling was a renowned orchestra conductor.Suzanne is a concert violist, long unsatisfied withher marriage to a composer whose music turnsemotion into thought. Now, more alone thanshe’s ever been, she must grieve secretly. But ascomplex as that effort is, it pales with the arrival ofAlex’s widow, who blackmails her into completingthe score for Alex’s unfinished viola concerto.As Suzanne struggles to keep her double life asecret from her husband, from her best friend,and from the other members of her quartet, sheis consumed by memories of a rich love affairsaturated with music. Increasingly manipulated byher lover’s widow and tormented by the concerto’smany layers, Suzanne realizes she may loseeverything she’s spent her life working for.A story of love, loss, sex, class, and betrayal,this psychologically compelling novel exploresthe ways that artists’ lives and work interact, thenature of relationships among women as friendsand competitors, and what it means to make a lifeof art.
