Book description
Janice Galloway's new novel is based on the life of Clara Schumann:
celebrated nineteenth-century concert pianist and composer, editor and
teacher, friend of Brahms - who was also the wife of Robert Schumann,
the mother of his eight children, and the woman who cared for him
through a series of crippling mental illnesses.
Clara is a lyrical and vibrant account of two remarkable and
highly dramatic musical careers, but primarily it is a novel about
timeless, common things: about the inescapable influences of
childhood, about creativity and marital life, about communication and
silence, about how art is made and how art, in turn, may erode or save
the life that nourishes it.
Janice Galloway's first novel,
The Trick is to Keep Breathing,
now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic, was published
in 1990 and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel,
Foreign Parts,
won the American Academy of Arts and Letters EM Forster Award while her
third,
Clara
, about the tempestuous life of nineteenth-century pianist Clara Wieck
Schumann, won the Saltire Award in 2002. Collaborative texts include an
opera with Sally Beamish and three cross-discipline works with Anne
Bevan, the Orcadian sculptor. Her 'anti-memoir',
This is not about me
, was published by Granta in September 2008 to universal critical
acclaim. She lives in Lanarkshire
