'Unhappiness is like being in love: it occupies every moment of every day'
After a long and happy marriage, Frances is suddenly plunged into mourning. Her international-celebrity husband Steven has died leaving her unprepared and vulnerable. At first she is completely submerged in her own loss until, shocked into feeling by the unexpected revelations and private sufferings of others, she is drawn agonisingly into new life - not into perfect happiness but into the sunlight of new hope. Penelope Lively's moving and beautifully observed novel illuminates two terrifying taboos of the twentieth century - death and grief.
'A novel which will extend and deepen the reader's understanding of how people behave'
Allan Massie, Scotsman
'Her fine novel touched our depths'
David Hughes, Mail on Sunday
'Many excellent things ... Penelope Lively's best novel to date'
Evening Standard
The fifth Brandenburg. Somewhere, some place every moment, an orchestra is playing the fifth Brandenburg concerto. Violins are tucked under chins, bows rise and fall; in recording studios and concert rooms, and here in the dining-hall of a Cambridge college where a hundred and fifty people are gathered together for no reason except circumstance which is perhaps the reason for everything. They are together for one hour fifty minutes and for the most part will never see one another again.
Some, of course will.
Zoe, scowling at the ceiling of the hall and thinking of the perversity of such places in which everything was hitched once to a day, to an hour, but is adrift now in a distant day, an unheeded hour. Once careful hands created the plasterwork of that ceiling. Other eyes have blinked in the light from that window. Through this room have passed beliefs too alien to contemplate. She directs her scowl - which indicates concentration rather than mood - to the portraits at the far end, above the orchestra. The portraits too are adrift. Their hefty gilt frames are a matching set but they wall in people tethered by their appearance to seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century: ruff, armour, cravat, wig. They are left behind, these people, of no account, present and yet profoundly absent, presiding mindless over Brandenburg Five undreamed of in their unimaginable yesterdays.
Tabitha, in a frilled white shirt, furiously intent among the second violins.
Morris.
Frances, sitting with hands folded and face blank, recollecting not in tranquillity but in ripe howling grief her husband Steven dead now eight months two weeks one day.
It is for one of them, for two, perhaps for several, a moment outside time, one of those moments when the needle gets stuck, when what happens goes on happening, down the years, again and again, recorded messages of glassy clarity whose resonances are always the same and yet also subtly different, charged with the insights of today, and yesterday. Forever, people are playing the Brandenburg Five.
