Kirjahaku

How do you lose music? Then having lost it, what do you do next? This book offers an account of one man's struggle to recover from loss of his greatest passion - and go one further than that: to restore his ability not only to hear but to think about and feel music, by going back to the series of big bangs which kicked off his musical universe.

William has a good, steady job in retail. He works in the bedlinen department of an Oxford Street store. He knows everything there is to know about comfy.Lucy has a portfolio career which, in her view, is no kind of career at all. Her life is a mess, her love life even more unsatisfactory than that. She wouldn’t be comfortable if she sat on a sofa in Heal’s. Unable to sleep, she thinks a new pillow might be the answer.William and Lucy are not connected. Yet the pair of them share a terrible memory from the past, the sort of joint recollection that changes with the light, depending on who you were and where you were standing at the time. The question is: what to do with it?Pillow Man is a London novel of our uneasy times. It has love in it and darkness. It sets lonely tunes to a broken backbeat. It marries life to death. Crucially, it explores the difficult metaphysics of bedtime. What, after all, do we really mean by ‘thread-count’?

***ONE OF BILLBOARD'S TOP TEN MUSIC BOOKS OF 2018***‘A brilliant book about singing… I have been talking to Nick Coleman about music, in person and in my head, for forty years now. [With Voices] you have the opportunity to hear what I have heard. I hope you take it’ Nick Hornby in The BelieverWhat happens when we fall in love with a voice; the siren call of someone singing? The history of post-war popular music is traditionally told sociologically or in terms of musicological influence and innovation in style. Voices takes a different tack. In ten discrete but cohering essays Coleman tackles the arc of that history as if it were an emotional experience with real psychological consequences – as chaotic, random, challenging and unpredictable as life itself. Voices is the story of what it is to listen and learn. Above all, it is a story of what it means to feel.