The beloved singer-songwriter Cass Wheeler has abandoned retirement for one last chapter in her musical career. She assembles an album of greatest hits - the songs that mean the most to her, songs that she wrote during the brightest and darkest times in her life. Each chapter springs from one of these songs. Told in tandem with the lyrics, this irresistible novel moves skillfully across episodes of a fascinating and sometimes tragic life - from Cass'...

A former rock star disappears on the Cumberland moors. When his wife finds him, she discovers he has become a hermit and a painter of apocalyptic visions. An art dealer has drug-induced visions of demonic faces swirling in a bedstead and soon his wife disappears, nowhere to be found. A beautiful Irish girl, who has stabbed her father to death is determined to seduce her best friend's husband. A young composer begins to experience aural hallucinations,...

"From the author of Star-Crossed...Behind every great love song is a great love story. It's been seven years and Diana is finally ready to marry her long-time fiancé, Arie; she's even composing a beautiful love song for him, working on it in hotels and concert halls as she criss-crosses the world as a classical pianist. Before she can finish it, though, tragedy strikes--and Diana is lost to Arie forever. But her song might not be... In Australia,...

"Juliet Lyman is a senior executive at Yesterday Records. Music is her passion and she's very good at her job. That's why her famously philanthropic boss Gideon sends her to Majorca, Spain to work with a very tortured, but talented client. Lionel Harding is one of the best song writers of the 20th century, the multi-Grammy award-winning lyricist of the third most recorded song in history. But now he's 42 and six months overdue on his latest paid assignment....

"When the narrator of The Hearing Test, an artist in her late twenties, awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, she is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the specter of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year—a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned—while living alone in a New York City studio apartment...