The award-winning Grace Notes is a compact and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art. With superb artistry and startling intimacy, it brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna — estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and musician making her mark in a male-dominated field. It is a book that the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One's Own would instantly understand. "MacLaverty summons up a time and a place with an unerring exactness reminiscent of Joyce's Dubliners . . . a magnificent portrait of the sources and ends, wretchedness and rewards, of creativity."—Sunday Times [London] "Page after page something delighted and moved me-marvelous, vivid tours of emotion, intelligence, poetry-every step of the way. Compelling."—Dennis McFarland, author of The Music Room "I was reminded of the way Joyce Cary so brilliantly portrayed a painter's life in The Horse's Mouth. . . . What a wonderful writer [MacLaverty] is!"—Andrea Barrett "More ambitious than any of his previous work . . . a remarkable novel."—Anna Mundow, Boston Globe Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize Winner of the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award