The Variations

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agness Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past. When she dies, Seldas gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty or impossibility of living with the past.