Ghost Music

(This is the second edition of Ghost Music, which was originally published by Orion/Hachette).

A standalone sequel to the brilliantly-reviewed While the Music Lasts, Ghost Music was inspired by McVeigh's fifteen years of touring on four continents with London orchestras including the BBC Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique.

William Mellor - passionately conflicted by his love for his disabled wife, Margot, and for his violist lover, Isabel - has resigned from the Orchestra of London and accepted a cellist position in the Sinfonia of London, instead.

However, no sooner has he bought a strangely resonant cello at auction than strange things begin to happen... and not only to William himself, but to his Polish conductor Zimetski - things that seem connected to another new cellist in his section, the beautiful, but somehow empty, Janice. Figuring out the mystery takes William to Gdansk, to Greece and to Japan... and to the heart of his personal conflict.

Excerpts:

Obsessions: not my style. Maybe I’m too observant. I’ve often wondered what love feels like – the ‘real deal’, no-holds-barred – but without ever wishing it on myself. But remember, Zimetski was a romantic. You have to be a romantic to get married three times, and never for money.

*

And he marvelled, how Isabel has changed me! Before her I loved my wife, I loved my son – and, perhaps, I loved Piotr. Now I’m open to every gust of love. I see the world with different eyes – I play the cello with different fingers. I ache with so many loves, so many feelings! Is it possible that love can become a habit, like suffering?

*

Poor girl, to be thrown to the anacondas of the horn section, the predators of the percussion. I trusted that she was tougher than she looked and knew ju-jitsu. I hoped that she had imbibed, as with mother’s milk, the Truth about Trumpets.