‘Spanning the decades between the late 1950s to the 1990s, The Devil’s Music (Bloomsbury, 2009) explores the disintegration of a family through lack of communication, grief, anger and the tricks of distorted memory. Beautifully written and displaying a particularly well-tuned sense of time and place’ – Dr Mardi Stewart in The Literateur
1958: the Sputnik satellite has taken a dog up into space and five-year-old Andy has a new sister, Elaine – a baby who, his father insists, is ‘not quite all there’. While his parents argue about sending Elaine away Andy sleeps beside her cot each night, to keep guard.
Knots keep treasures safe, his rope-maker grandfather tells him and, as he listens to stories of Harry Houdini, Andy learns the Carrick Bend, the Midshipman’s Hitch and the Monkey’s Fist. But one day, at The Siding – the old railway carriage that serves as the family’s seaside retreat – Andy is left in charge of his baby sister on a windswept beach and discovers not all treasures can be kept safe for ever.
Three decades later Andrew returns from self-imposed exile to The Siding, the place where his life first unravelled. Looking back on the broken strands of his childhood, he tries to weave them together, aided by his grandfather’s copy of The Ashley Book of Knots and the arrival of a wild-haired, tango-dancing sculptor – a woman with her own ideas about making peace with the past.
“There is a great deal of good writing and expert story-telling meshed together in Jane Rusbridge’s novel .Where it impresses most is in the way it shows how a child thinks – the touchstones, the surreal associations, the delight in words as new and shiny playthings, the misinterpretations of the adult world.” Karen Howlett, Cornflower Reviews
Order your copy of The Devil’s Music at Waterstones.com or Bloomsbury, or read the first chapter by clicking here
