Thomas Mann’s novel chronicles the life of Adrian Leverkühn, a fictional German composer who bargains his soul for two decades of musical genius.
The novel is a profound exploration of artistic ambition and morality, using Leverkühn’s radical compositions—which Mann describes in detail using real musicological theory—as an allegory for Germany’s cultural and political descent into Nazism.
This energetic novel follows Jimmy Rabbitte Jr., a young working-class Dubliner who assembles a soul band with the aim of bringing the genre to his city. The Commitments is a humorous and heartfelt look at the practical and personal struggles of starting a band, capturing the collaborative energy, ego clashes, and pure joy of making music.
Rob Fleming, a London record store owner, is obsessed with music, viewing his life through the lens of playlists and top-five lists.
When his girlfriend leaves him, he revisits his past relationships to understand his failures, using his encyclopedic knowledge of pop music as both a crutch and a method of self-analysis, exploring how musical taste shapes identity and memory.
Michael, a professional violinist in a London-based string quartet, rekindles a passionate affair with Julia, a pianist he loved years earlier who is now losing her hearing.
The novel is deeply immersed in the world of classical music, detailing the intense discipline, internal politics, and profound emotional connections of musicians whose lives are inseparable from their art.
When terrorists take hostages at a party in South America, the one thing that bridges the gap between captors and captives is the transcendent voice of Roxane Coss, a world-famous opera singer.
Music becomes the universal language in the household, fostering unexpected bonds and proving that art can create humanity and beauty even in the most desperate of circumstances.
Toni Morrison’s Jazz is not only set in the vibrant Jazz Age of 1920s Harlem but is structurally and thematically modeled on the musical form itself. The novel’s narrative riffs, improvises, and repeats with variations, as an anonymous narrator pieces together the story of a tragic love triangle.
The prose captures the passion, sorrow, and unpredictable rhythms of jazz music to explore themes of love, betrayal, and African American history.
Inspired by a true story, this novel focuses on a cellist who, after a mortar shell kills 22 people in a bread line, decides to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor at the site of the attack for 22 consecutive days.
His defiant act of art in the midst of the Siege of Sarajevo becomes a symbol of hope and resistance, connecting the lives of three other city dwellers struggling to retain their humanity.
Catherine McKenna, a young composer and new mother, struggles with postpartum depression while grappling with her fractured past in Northern Ireland.
The novel intricately links her creative process to her personal turmoil, showing how she transforms the discordant sounds of her memory—from sectarian violence to family conflict—into a powerful musical composition.
Legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson appears on the Spokane Indian Reservation and gives his enchanted guitar to Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who forms a blues-rock band, Coyote Springs.
The novel follows the band's journey as they navigate the music industry, confronting the ghosts of the past and the realities of modern Native American life, with the blues serving as a medium for both pain and resilience.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel presents a constellation of interconnected stories centered on Bennie Salazar, a former punk rocker and current record executive, and his troubled assistant, Sasha.
Spanning decades, the book offers a kaleidoscopic view of the music industry, exploring themes of authenticity, failure, and the relentless passage of time through the lives of musicians, producers, and fans.
In this epic reimagining of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Salman Rushdie chronicles the lifelong love affair between two rock-and-roll superstars, Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama.
The novel is a sprawling history of rock music from the 1950s to the 1990s, blending myth and reality to explore how music shapes identity, culture, and love in a globalized world.
This novel is a fictionalized biography of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, focusing on three critical moments in his life where he stood in opposition to the Soviet state under Stalin.
Barnes masterfully portrays the inner turmoil of an artist forced to compromise his integrity to survive, exploring the complex relationship between genius, cowardice, and the crushing power of tyranny.
This collection contains five loosely connected stories about musicians—a fading pop singer, a talented cellist, a jazz instrumentalist—on the cusp of change. Each story delicately explores themes of ambition, missed opportunity, and the quiet anxieties of artistic life, revealing how music both defines and deludes its practitioners.
A young boy named Claude Rawlings grows up in poverty in post-war New York City and discovers he is a piano prodigy. The novel follows his immersive journey through the world of classical music, detailing his rigorous training, his relationships with mentors, and the immense personal sacrifices required to achieve artistic greatness.
In 1886, a quiet London piano tuner named Edgar Drake is commissioned by the British War Office for a strange mission: to travel to the remote jungles of Burma to repair the grand piano of an eccentric army surgeon.
The journey confronts him with the clash of cultures and the mysterious power of music to both soothe and incite conflict in a colonial outpost.
The children of a biracial couple—a Black mother and a German-Jewish physicist father—find their identities and a refuge from the racism of mid-20th century America through music.
The novel follows the lives of these gifted siblings as they pursue careers in classical music, using musical concepts like counterpoint and harmony to structure its epic story of family, race, and civil rights.
This intensely lyrical and fragmented novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Buddy Bolden, the brilliant, enigmatic, and ultimately tragic cornetist who was a key figure in the birth of jazz in early 20th-century New Orleans. Ondaatje pieces together a portrait of a man whose musical genius was inseparable from his descent into madness.
Erika Kohut is a repressed and emotionally damaged piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, living under the suffocating control of her mother.
Jelinek's searing novel uses the rigid, disciplined world of classical music as a backdrop for a disturbing exploration of sadomasochism, obsession, and the psychosexual pathologies lurking beneath a veneer of high culture.
Two musician brothers, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, leave Cuba in 1949 for New York City, where they form the Mambo Kings orchestra.
The novel, rich with the sounds and rhythms of Latin music, chronicles their brief moment of fame and the long, memory-haunted aftermath, exploring the immigrant experience, machismo, and the bittersweet power of music to preserve the past.
Set in the Danish court of the 17th century, the novel follows the story of Peter Claire, a lutenist hired to play in the king's orchestra.
He finds himself entangled in courtly intrigue and falls for one of the queen's handmaidens, as the narrative explores the contrasts between the expressive power of music and the destructive potential of secrets and silence.
This novel traces the artistic development of Thea Kronborg, from her childhood in a small Colorado town to her rise as a world-renowned opera singer.
Cather provides a detailed portrait of the dedication and relentless drive required of a performing artist, arguing that true artistic genius is born from a deep connection to one's roots and landscape.
In 1939 Paris, a group of jazz musicians, including the brilliant Black German trumpeter Hieronymus Falk, are caught in the Nazi occupation. Decades later, the band’s bassist, Sid, reflects on the friendships and betrayals that led to Falk’s arrest.
The novel is a powerful meditation on race, identity, and the price of survival, all set against the vibrant but perilous jazz scene of wartime Europe.
Julian Donahue, a middle-aged man adrift in his life, becomes obsessed with a young, emerging pop singer named Cait O’Dwyer after discovering her music online.
His obsession leads him on a journey across New York City’s music scene, blurring the line between fan and stalker in a story that examines how pop music shapes our emotions and romantic ideals.
In this wildly inventive and surreal novel, a highly intelligent, saxophone-playing bear leaves the zoo to make his name in the New York City jazz scene.
The book is both a hilarious satire and a deeply serious exploration of artistic creation, identity, and what it means to be an outsider, filled with learned and passionate writing about jazz improvisation.
A disfigured musical genius known as the Phantom haunts the labyrinthine depths of the Paris Opera House and becomes obsessed with Christine Daaé, a young soprano he secretly tutors.
The Gothic novel is a tale of tragic love and artistic obsession, where the opera house itself becomes a character and music is the medium for passion, manipulation, and terror.
In a down-at-the-heels 1980s neighborhood, Frank owns a vinyl-only record shop where he has a mystical ability to connect customers with the exact music they need to heal their troubles.
His life is upended by the arrival of a mysterious woman in a green coat, forcing him to confront his own emotional blockages through the power of the music he loves.
Two friends, one Black and one white, co-own a struggling vinyl record store in Oakland, California, in 2004. Their business and friendship are threatened by the impending opening of a megastore.
The novel is a love letter to soul music, jazz, and crate-digging culture, using the rhythms of funk and the warmth of vinyl to explore themes of fatherhood, race, and community.
Structured as the transcript of a music documentary, this novel chronicles the meteoric rise and explosive breakup of a fictional 1970s rock band.
Through interviews with the band members, it tells the story of the creative and romantic friction between its two lead singers, Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne, capturing the mythos and madness of the rock-and-roll lifestyle.
Four young musicians form the Van Ness String Quartet, and the novel follows their lives over nearly two decades of rehearsals, performances, and personal entanglements.
Gabel explores the intense, family-like bond of a chamber group, where personal sacrifices, rivalries, and love affairs are all sublimated for the sake of creating a single, perfect sound.
This historical novel reimagines the passionate and turbulent relationship between the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz and his muse, the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.
The story details the creation of Berlioz’s groundbreaking masterpiece, Symphonie fantastique, showing how his obsessive love directly fueled one of the most innovative musical works of the 19th century.
A young boy named Paul moves to Darwin, Australia, in the 1960s and begins taking piano lessons from Eduard Keller, a mysterious, demanding teacher with a dark European past.
The novel is a classic coming-of-age story about the complex relationship between a student and his maestro, exploring the nature of genius, memory, and the moral lessons embedded in art.
Renne Sundheimer, a former cello prodigy, is now a jaded teacher whose performance career has been derailed by crippling stage fright. His life changes when he begins mentoring a preternaturally gifted but legally troubled boy, a process that forces him to confront his own past and rediscover his love for music.
Seventy-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els is mistaken for a bioterrorist because of his home music-biology lab, forcing him on the run. As he flees, he reflects on his life's obsession: to find the patterns of music in all of creation, from biochemistry to the cosmos.
The novel is a brilliant exploration of the connections between science, music, and the politics of fear.
Over the course of one night in New York City, two teenagers connect through their shared passion for the indie rock scene. Nick, the bassist for a queercore band, and Norah, the daughter of a famous record producer, embark on a quest to find a secret show, with their journey scored by the mixtapes that define their identities and budding romance.
This novel reimagines the life of Lev Termen, the Russian inventor of the theremin—one of the first electronic instruments. It follows his journey from the scientific circles of Leningrad to the jazz clubs of New York City, where he becomes entangled in espionage and a passionate love affair.
It is a story about the intersection of science, music, and politics, and the ethereal sound of an instrument played without touch.
Set in 1970s Detroit, the novel follows Danny Yzemski, a lonely high school kid dealing with the recent death of his father. He finds solace and a new identity in the raw power of rock and roll, as the music of The Stooges, MC5, and Alice Cooper becomes the soundtrack to his coming of age amid the city's social and racial turmoil.
Presented as an oral history, this novel tells the story of the rise and fall of a fictional 1970s interracial rock duo: Opal, a proto-Afro-punk firebrand from Detroit, and Nev, a quirky white British songwriter.
The book uses their explosive career to explore race, gender, and appropriation in the music industry, culminating in a violent concert that becomes a dark legend.
In this intense novella, a man on a train confesses to the narrator that he murdered his wife out of jealousy, a madness he claims was ignited after she performed Beethoven’s passionate Kreutzer Sonata with a male violinist.
The story is a fierce critique of societal conventions and a stark examination of the destructive, almost demonic, power of music to unleash primal emotions.
Inspired by the life of legendary jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, this novel follows Rick Martin, a gifted, self-taught musician obsessed with creating a perfect sound that no one else can hear. Baker's classic work captures the obsessive, all-consuming nature of artistic genius and the tragic isolation of a musician who lives only for his art.
Oliver Orme, a painter and petty thief, finds his artistic inspiration has vanished.
The novel is his confessional monologue, in which he reflects on art, authenticity, and desire, framing his creative block through the metaphor of Wallace Stevens's poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar," which explores the tension between reality and the artistic imagination.
Desmond Howl, a reclusive, drug-addled rock star living in a seaside mansion, is haunted by the death of his brother and has spent years composing a symphony for whales.
This darkly funny novel follows his journey toward redemption as he confronts his past, exploring themes of grief, addiction, and the strange, redemptive power of musical creation.
Lilliet Berne, a legendary soprano in 19th-century Paris, is offered an original role that she comes to realize is based on her own secret, scandalous past. To uncover who betrayed her, she must trace her journey from a circus performer to a courtesan to an opera star, in a sweeping novel about identity, ambition, and the power of the human voice.
While not solely about music, this epic novel revolves around the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley, referred to simply as "The Singer."
The event serves as the catalyst for a polyphonic narrative that spans decades and continents, exploring how The Singer's music and mythic status shaped Jamaican politics, gang violence, and national identity.
Two white, privileged hipsters and music producers in New York, obsessed with collecting old blues records, accidentally create a viral hoax: a "lost" 1920s blues song by a fictional singer.
But they soon find themselves haunted by the song's "ghost" and dragged into the dark, violent history of racial exploitation that underpins the music they love and commodify.
Set in 1970s Birmingham, this novel follows a group of school friends as they navigate adolescence, political turmoil, and racial tensions.
A central thread is their love for progressive rock music; the book's title is taken from an album by the band Hatfield and the North, and one of the novel's key set pieces is the attempt by the main characters to compose and perform their own 20-minute prog-rock epic.
The fourth installment in Mackey's experimental "From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate" series, this novel is composed of letters from a musician in a fictional jazz ensemble called the Molimo m'Atet.
The book uses a deeply philosophical and lyrical style to explore the act of musical improvisation, collective creation, and the spiritual dimensions of jazz.
Based on a true story, this novel tells of Daniel, a Jewish violin maker imprisoned in Auschwitz who is forced to participate in a cruel experiment: to craft a perfect violin for his Nazi captors.
The act of creation becomes a quiet act of defiance and a struggle to preserve his own humanity, showing how art and craftsmanship can endure even in the most inhumane conditions.
Spanning generations of a family in China, this novel explores the impact of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests. At its heart are two composers whose lives are torn apart by political persecution.
Classical music, particularly the work of Bach, serves as a through-line of memory, resistance, and hope, a secret language that preserves history when official narratives try to erase it.
During the brutal siege of Leningrad in World War II, a group of starving musicians is assembled to perform Shostakovich's newly composed Seventh "Leningrad" Symphony.
The novel focuses on the real-life conductor Karl Eliasberg, who must rally the emaciated orchestra to deliver a performance that will be broadcast to inspire the city and defy the German invaders in an ultimate act of artistic resistance.
During the Italian and German occupation of the Greek island of Cephalonia in WWII, a music-loving Italian officer, Captain Antonio Corelli, is billeted with a local doctor and his daughter, Pelagia.
Corelli’s love for his mandolin and the music he creates becomes a bridge between him and Pelagia, in a story that explores how love and art can flourish, however briefly, amidst the brutality of war.
A young pianist, Genevieve, travels to Paris in the 1830s to study with the magnetic and brilliant composer Franz Liszt. She is drawn into his inner circle, navigating the intense rivalries and romantic passions of the city's artistic scene.
The novel explores the challenges for a female musician in a male-dominated world and the fine line between mentorship and exploitation.
Isabel Delancey, a classical violinist, is left broke and homeless after her husband’s death. She inherits a dilapidated country mansion, where she discovers a community of characters and a new purpose.
The violin remains her emotional anchor as she struggles to rebuild her life, with music representing both the sophisticated world she has lost and a potential path to a more authentic future.
Ray McMillian, a young Black classical musician, is on the verge of the world’s most prestigious violin competition when his priceless Stradivarius, a family heirloom, is stolen.
The novel is both a gripping mystery and a sharp critique of the racism within the classical music world, as Ray fights to reclaim his instrument and his rightful place on the concert stage.
This monumental novel explores the lives of various figures in Germany and the Soviet Union during the 20th century.
One of its most significant sections is a detailed, empathetic portrayal of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and his fraught relationship with the Soviet authorities, examining how his symphonies became coded expressions of dissent and despair under totalitarianism.
Ursa Corregidora is a Kentucky blues singer whose personal history is haunted by generations of sexual abuse that began during slavery. After an accident leaves her unable to have children, her singing becomes the only way to "bear witness" to her family's traumatic past.
The novel powerfully links the raw, painful expression of the blues to the legacy of historical and personal trauma.