Lessons in Harmony

LESSONS IN HARMONY, the story of the bond between two giants of twentieth century music, is as witty, lapidary and elegant as a Ravel miniature and as rich and deep as Vaughan Williams at his most lyrical. With his love of music, European culture and the foibles of Britishness, Jonathan Coe is uniquely equipped to craft this story of male friendship, art, love and nationhood * STUART MACONIE *
I was completely convinced and engrossed by the fictional reconstruction of the friendship between those two very different composers. The writing has all the subtlety and wit that is customary for Jonathan Coe, but rare, and there is so much wisdom in it - about the sacrifices demanded of the friends and partners in the orbit of a musical genius, about rivalry, disappointment, and the convulsions of world politics * CLARE CHAMBERS *
LESSONS IN HARMONY is a witty, poignant, layered blend of memoir, anecdote and recollection, so convincingly rendered that one neither knows (nor cares) where fact ends and fiction begins. I was left ruminating not only the impact creatives have on each other, but also how Coe succeeds in balancing, with so light a touch, harmony, discord, and sacrifice in the musical, the personal, AND the political. A highly satisfying, wise and humane read * JOANNA MILLER *
My comfort read: anything by Jonathan Coe * BOB MORTIMER *
Probably the best English novelist of his generation’ * NICK HORNBY *
A new Jonathan Coe is always a treat * THE TIMES *
Please God… if there is a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe * ANTHONY BOURDAIN *
A novelist who gains in range and reputation with every book * PAT BARKER *
Coe’s light, funny writing makes you feel better * Evening Standard *

Absolutely wonderful - I just loved it. A book that slowly, quietly
reveals its themes and points of view. Beautifully, elegantly, movingly
done

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of sixteen novels, including What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club, Middle England, The Proof of My Innocence, and Lessons in Harmony. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Europeen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Medicis etranger, and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages.

Jonathan Coe lives in London.

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