Captivating and hypnotic writing from a prize-winning novelist whose prose is reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson's and Paul Harding's.
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.