Kirsty Gunn: The Big Music

Musiikista teemansa ottava laaturomaani. 472 pages, Paperback

First published July 3, 2012

'The hills only come back the I don't mind . . .' begins Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music, a novel that takes us to a new understanding of how fiction can affect us. Presented as a collection of found papers, appendices and notes, The Big Music tells the story of John Sutherland of 'The Grey House', who is dying and creating in the last days of his life a musical composition that will define it. Yet he has little idea of how his tune will echo or play out into the world - and as the book moves inevitably through its themes of death and birth, change and stasis, the sound of his solitary story comes to merge and connect with those around him. In this work of fiction, Kirsty Gunn has created something as real as music or as a dream. Not so much a novel as a place the reader comes to inhabit and to know, The Big Music is a literary work of undeniable originality and power.

Kirsty Gunn (born 1960, New Zealand) is a novelist, essayist, short story writer, and professor of creative writing. She has won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year award, the New Zealand Post Book Awards Book of the Year award, and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

Her 2012 novel The Big Music won the Book of the Year in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards.[11][12] The novel took seven years to write, and was inspired by pibroch, the classical music of the great Highland bagpipe.