Top ten jazz books

Blood Count, Reggie Nadelson's ninth Artie Cohen novel, "finds the Russian-born NYPD detective investigating the death of an ailing Russian woman, one of the few white occupants of a once-grand apartment block in Harlem. Cohen is alerted to the death by an ex-girlfriend who lives there, but when he arrives there's a strange air of something having been covered up."

At the Guardian, Nadelson named her top ten jazz books.

One book on her list:

Jazz by Toni Morrison

Set in Harlem during the Jazz Age, this is the story of interlocking characters in New York and how they made the journey north—tragic, ecstatic, terrible, thrilling. Morrison is one of the few authors who can really make her prose swing, can make you feel what jazz music meant, felt like, did to people, in its first great era.

Read about the other books on the list.

Toni Morrison's Jazz is Mohsin Hamid's most influential book.

Also see: John Edward Hasse's five best books on jazz.

--Marshal Zeringue