Ten top musical novels

Rebecca Kauffman is originally from rural northeastern Ohio. She received her B.A. in Classical Violin Performance from the Manhattan School of Music, and several years later, she received her M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University. She currently lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. She is the author of Another Place You’ve Never Been, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the acclaimed The Gunners.

At the Guardian, Kauffman tagged ten great works of fiction that incorporate music and/or musicians, including:

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

“‘The thing with the new world,’ the tuba had said once, ‘is it’s just horrifically short on elegance.’” Members of the Traveling Symphony roam a post-apocalyptic world performing Shakespeare and musical numbers for the remaining humans. The book opens with a scene from King Lear and uses classic motifs throughout. It is a wonderfully bizarre and haunting tribute to the endurance of art in the face of an unrecognisable world.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Station Eleven is among Nathan Englander’s ten favorite books, M.L. Rio’s five top novels inspired by Shakespeare, Anne Corlett's five top books with different takes on the apocalypse, Christopher Priest’s five top sci-fi books that make use of music, and Anne Charnock's five favorite books with fictitious works of art.

--Marshal Zeringue