11 Musical Novels That Hit All The Right Notes

Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel is set somewhere in South America at a birthday party hosted by the country’s vice president. Rozanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has just finished a mesmerizing performance when a band of terrorists breaks into the house and holds everyone for ransom. Salon calls Bel Canto “a story of passionate, doomed love; of the glory of art; of the triumph of our shared humanity over the forces that divide us.” OTS calls it “the most elegant, meditative hostage-takeover novel ever.”

In this inspired quintet, literary virtuoso Kazuo Ishiguro interlocks the stories of five individuals who find both solace and heartbreak in music. Haunting and reflective, it showcases the persistent influence of music, even as all else fades into twilight.

In a narrative that traverses centuries and space, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. It is a daring exploration of reality and identity.

A young singer’s artistic awakening comes at the expense of losing the only life she has ever known. Bittersweet and evocative, Willa Cather’s masterpiece explores the loss that ultimately accompanies an artist’s highest achievements, and the passion that makes it all worthwhile.

When a renowned composer and a newspaper editor reconnect at the funeral of a shared former lover, they make a pact with consequences that neither of them could ever have foreseen. Sharply witty and morally complex, this Man Booker Award–winning novel is a biting social satire about the justifications people make in the name of business, politics, and art.

Spanning four decades and divergent worlds, this is the erotically charged story of the renowned Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev. This historically inspired novel charts the extreme perfectionism and willful hedonism that drove the ballet star’s all-consuming artistic greatness, and reminds us that the thrill of the stage is both a curse and a redemption.

A talented composer finds himself on the run from Homeland Security when his home experiments attempting to embed music in genetic patterns get him labeled the “Bioterrorist Bach.” This creative and cerebral novel reaches a soaring crescendo when the musical fugitive dreams up a plan to turn his collision with the security state into a transformative work of art. The author’s website features a playlist of classical masterpieces relevant to the book—it’s well worth plugging in your headphones before you turn to the first page.

From 1860s Paris to twenty-first-century New York, an unlikely cast of characters is bound together across centuries and continents by the strange and spectacular history of Richard Wagner’s masterpiece Tristan and Isolde. It is a beautiful tribute to the unparalleled ability of music to satisfy the yearnings of the human heart.

From his window in Sarajevo, a musician sees twenty-two of his friends and neighbors killed by a mortar attack. He decides to honor their memory in the only way he knows how: through music. As he plays his cello at the point of impact for twenty-two days, more and more people are drawn into his musical orbit, revealing the small ways humanity can triumph even in the darkest of times.

In 1886, a piano tuner receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of northeast Burma to repair a rare piano belonging to an eccentric army surgeon. What follows is an atmospheric journey into a world of loneliness, seduction, and quiet intrigue.

In this fictionalized account of one of the fathers of jazz, a trumpet maestro slowly gives in to his demons against the colorful backdrop of New Orleans in the Roaring Twenties. Insanity and genius become hauntingly intertwined in this darkly beautiful meditation on what it means to give everything to your art.