Book description
New York, June 1961. The Bill Evans Trio, featuring twenty-five year
old Scott LaFaro on bass, play a series of concerts at the Village
Vanguard that will go down in musical history. Shortly afterwards,
LaFaro is killed in a car accident, and Evans disappears.
Intermission tells the story of what happens next.
In measured, evocative prose, Intermission takes a period
from the life of one of America's great artists and fashions it into a
fiction of extraordinary imaginative skill and ambition. The novel
inhabits the lives of four people in orbit around a tragedy,
presenting an intense and moving portrait of the burden of grief, and
of a man lost to his family and to himself. It is also a conjuring of
a pivotal moment in American music and culture, and a unique
representation of the jazz scene in the early 1960s.
Intermission is a novel of pure control and power, certain to
establish Owen Martell as one of the most promising young writers in
Britain today.
Owen Martell grew up in South Wales and studied at the universities
of Aberystwyth and Oxford. He has published two previous novels in
Welsh. He won the Wales Book of the Year Award for his first novel and
was shortlisted for the same prize with his second novel. This is his
first novel written in English.
