American Music

From the author of I Was Amelia Earhart comes this luminous love story that winds through several generations--told in Jane Mendelsohn's distinctive, mesmerizing style.

Milo, severely wounded in the Iraq war, is confined to a rehabilitation hospital. When his physical therapist, Honor, touches his destroyed back, mysterious images from the past appear to them and begin to weave together in an intricate, mysterious tapestry of stories. There is a husband and wife in the 1930s, whose marriage is tested by a bewitching artistic cousin. There is the heartrending story of a photographer in the 1960s and the shocking theft of her life's work. And there is a eunuch and a sultan's concubine, whose forbidden love is captured in music. The stories converge in a symphonic crescendo that reveals the far-flung origins of America's endlessly romantic soul and exposes the source of Honor and Milo's own love. A beautiful mystery and a meditation on love--its power and limitations--American Music is a brilliantly original novel.