Vienna Nocturne: A Novel Hardback - 2014

Media reviews

Advance praise for Vienna Nocturne
 
“You don’t have to be an opera buff to fall deep into Vienna Nocturne. Vivien Shotwell catapults you straight into the eighteenth century with abundant, vivid detail. I found Anna Storace’s journey from prodigy to prima donna an irresistible tale.”—Nancy Horan, author of Loving Frank and Under the Wide and Starry Sky
 
“Passionate and yet precise, dense with feeling yet as clean as a bird in flight: This novel emulates Mozart’s music even as it beautifully imagines his love for a memorable singer. What an excellent debut!”—Andrea Barrett, National Book Award–winning author of Archangel and Ship Fever
 
“Vienna Nocturne is as finely intelligent as it is lushly romantic, and beautifully renders how much music can convey, even when it’s hardly the only expressive tool lovers have at hand. Very few novels have expressed as persuasively how it feels to be taken up by the kind of passions that, despite everything, can make a soul huge with life and joy.”—Jim Shepard, author of National Book Award finalist Like You’d Understand, Anyway
 
“Vivien Shotwell has written a novel that, like her heroine, the singer Anna Storace, is brilliant, warm, irresistible, and infinitely moving. Her descriptions of music, of her characters, of Venice and Vienna are so vivid and so richly compelling that I was amazed to look up from these pages and discover that I was still in Massachusetts. Vienna Nocturne is a transporting and deeply satisfying debut.”—Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street and The Flight of Gemma Hardy
 
“Vivien Shotwell’s love, knowledge, and passion for music shines through this seductive tale. A lovely read.”—Eva Stachniak, author of The Winter Palace
 
“Vivien Shotwell combines the keen observations of a fine writer with a musician’s sense of structure and technique. She brings alive the mystery of music from the inside, and the effect is delightful. A remarkable accomplishment.”—Thad Carhart, author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank
 
“Vivien Shotwell’s elegant, keenly observed debut is as deeply imagined as it is deeply felt. At turns lyrical and dramatic, witty and wise, Vienna Nocturne is both a fascinating portrait of a long-lost world and an introduction to a gorgeous new literary voice.”—Jennifer DuBois, author of Cartwheel
 
“Vienna Nocturne is a gorgeous symphony of a novel, the story, the prose, the sweet, sad whole of it both lush and perfectly controlled. Like much great music, it lures us in with the catchy and hummable—an irresistibly glamorous love story—but hides depths beneath and between the melodies. I will never listen to Mozart the same way again.”—Yael Goldstein Love, author of The Passion of Tasha Darsky