A liberated, dynamic and successfully writer, Piya has everything she has ever wanted, until she's revisited by her past... Faraway Music is the story of a young Bengali girl, and her stumbles through the world of love. First as an adolescent in Calcutta, where she grows up in a loving home with her mother and grandparents, then as a gutsy journalist in love with her married boss, who finds herself caught in the nexus between politicians and the media, and finally as the reclusive writer married to an artist in the United States. Sensuous, profound, lyrical and moving, Faraway Music is the story of family, friendship, fame, love, loss...and all that lies in between.

A dynamic multimedia introduction to the global connections among peoples and their music

“t was then that I decided to write you these letters. One crisp winter day in New York, Willem receives a phone call – it's time to go home. Home to Amsterdam – to an estranged family and forgotten relationships. As he reflects on his life, unwilling to face the future, he finds himself reaching out to the brother he has lost. This revised edition of Simon Stephens's landmark play, is published to coincide with the revival at HOME Manchester, February 2023, starring Will Young

A New York Times Notable Book Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award A personal, lyrical narrative about storytelling and empathy, from the author of Orwell's Roses Apricots. Her mother's disintegrating memory. An invitation to Iceland. Illness. These are Rebecca Solnit's raw materials, but The Faraway Nearby goes beyond her own life, as she spirals out into the stories she heard and read—from fairy tales to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—that helped her navigate her difficult passge. Solnit takes us into the lives of others—an arctic cannibal, the young Che Guevara among the leprosy afflicted, a blues musician, an Icelandic artist and her labyrinth—to understand warmth and coldness, kindness and imagination, decay and transformation, making art and making self. This captivating, exquisitely written exploration of the forces that connect us and the way we tell our stories is a tour de force of association, a marvelous Russian doll of a book that is a fitting companion to Solnit's much-loved A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Des Howell is a former rock 'n' roll star who never leaves his secluded oceanfront mansion. Naked, rich and fabulously deranged, he subsists on a steady diet of whiskey, pharmaceuticals and jelly doughnuts and occasionally works on his masterpiece, "Whale Music." One day, upon awakening from his usual drunken stupor, Des discovers on his sofa a young alien from the faraway universe of Toronto. This girl has made the trek to Des' hideaway because she believes in the "Whale Music" and she's crazy enough to think that Des can make a comeback hit with his mad magnum opus--