PRAISE FOR THE PRAGUE SONATA
A Buzz Books Pick Fall/Winter 2017
“Twining music history with the political tumults of the 20th century, The Prague Sonata is a sophisticated, engrossing intellectual mystery . . . At the heart of the adventure story is a sensitive exploration of music’s strange power to encode memories into its themes and progressions . . . [Morrow’s] captivating, hopeful book presents a vision of the broken past, restored.”
―Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"A treasure of a novel. I read The Prague Sonata with marvel and gusto. Such a deliciously enveloping musical mystery! Heartiest congratulations on a virtuoso performance."
—Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper's Wife
"Bradford Morrow is an astonishing writer. His short fictions are brilliantly macabre, and his longer fictions are epic adventures in which obsessive particularities—in this case the provenance of a piano sonata presumed to be of the late 18th century—transform entire lives in the most unexpected and remarkable ways. Having explored the netherworld of ingenious fakery in The Forgers, Morrow now explores an even more intricately rendered world of rivalrous musicologists in his most ambitious novel to date, The Prague Sonata."
—Joyce Carol Oates, A Book of American Martyrs
“The Prague Sonata is music scored for the reader’s imagination, expertly arranged―at once suspenseful and meditative, classical and surprising, devastating and genuinely inspiring. What a gorgeous novel this is. I thought often of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves―the fragmentation and ephemeral unity, its power to absorb us fully into a moving music. Bradford Morrow’s writing is as haunting and as beautiful as the fabled sonata it describes.”
―Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
“The Prague Sonata is a mighty, epic novel that only Bradford Morrow could have written. Moving from New York to Prague to London and beyond, it is a major and compelling work about the persistence of a smart, determined woman with a real commitment both to music and to truth. Rich in historical detail, beautifully sharp when it comes to music and manuscripts, The Prague Sonata challenges us to consider what it means to save culture in the face of forces that want to achieve power at its expense. Morrow has given us a masterful novel that’s necessary for our times.”
―Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain
"This rich, masterful novel brilliantly explores the complex tumble of history, the human capacity for good and evil, the fragile but redeeming glory of art. Morrow has long been one of America's finest novelists. And this humanely epic tale is his finest book.
—Robert Olen Butler, Perfume River
“[A] textured, style-rich historical novel . . . enjoyable for anyone who loves a symphony of words.”
―Booklist (starred review)
“Music infuses Morrow’s descriptions of war, revolution, peace, love, friendship, and betrayal. Finely crafted storytelling . . . The reading pleasure comes from both Meta’s pursuit and the prose, which brims with musical, historical, and cultural detail.”
―Publishers Weekly
“Music and war come to a crescendo in Bradford Morrow’s The Prague Sonata.”
―Vanity Fair, “Hot type”