Lessons in Harmony

A STUNNING, HEARTFELT NEW NOVEL ABOUT A DECADES-LONG FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN TWO COMPOSERS FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE, BOURNVILLE AND MIDDLE ENGLAND The year is 1907 and Maurice Ravel is one of the most admired young composers in France. In Belle Epoque Paris he cuts a charismatic, dandyish figure, whose technically flawless music hides a deep emotional core, and whose unpredictable talent is as hard to pin down as his mysterious personal life. When Ravel's devoted acolyte Mylo encourages him to take on a new pupil - a rising British composer called Ralph Vaughan Williams - an unlikely cross-channel friendship starts to blossom. The two men could hardly be more different. Ralph is down-to-earth, married, and currently engaged in a long-term project of collecting forgotten British folk songs - a musical form in which Ravel has no interest. All they truly have in common is that in clear but indefinable ways, each of them seems an archetypal representative of his own country. But as the shadow of war approaches, their friendship becomes entwined with Mylo's own tragic story. The two friends must pursue their vocation through one of the most turbulent but creative periods in history. Will their differing senses of national identity - one 'typically French', the other 'so British' - liberate or constrain them? LESSONS IN HARMONY is a stunning novel about the power of music to create beauty, to freeze time, and, at its greatest, to express the personality not just of its composer, but of an entire nation. 'A new Jonathan Coe is always a treat' The Times 'My comfort read: anything by Jonathan Coe' Bob Mortimer 'Probably the best English novelist of his generation' Nick Hornby 'Please God... if there is a next life, let me write as well as Jonathan Coe' Anthony Bourdain

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the award-winning, bestselling author of fifteen novels, including What a Carve Up!, The Rotters' Club, Middle England and, most recently, The Proof of My Innocence. He has won the Costa Novel Award, the Prix du Livre Européen, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, among many others. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. Jonathan Coe lives in London.