Grace Notes

Grace Notes is a novel by Bernard MacLaverty, first published in 1997. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

For other uses, see Grace note (disambiguation).
First edition (publ. Jonathan Cape)

Plot summary

The book centers around the postpartum depression of its female protagonist, Catherine McKenna, a Northern Irish music teacher and composer living in Scotland. She faces preparations for her father's funeral, endures disturbing visions regarding her recently born daughter, Anna, and suffers restrictions imposed by the Catholic Church on her family and her childhood. She engages her depression through the cathartic and intuitive composition of music; later in the book, she begins to craft a master symphony. The novel ends with a powerful live radio broadcast of her symphony.

The title is an explicit reference to grace notes, which a character in the novel terms as "the notes between the notes". The redeeming power of art is indeed a prominent theme. In addition, critics have considered the concept of fleeting and minute musical notes as descriptive of the novel's style (Donath).

gollark: We had Cambridge Analytica and a gazillion random other things, and yet people probably just go "hmm, this sounds slightly bad, but abstract and not really relevant to me, and besides all my friends are here" and completely ignore it!
gollark: It'll probably take a giant scandal ("Facebook is stealing your credit card information and using it to buy random people illegal drugs!") to make people consider moving, and you know what? They probably won't!
gollark: Though they're still reachable by SMS, I can't participate in their group chats or whatever, and I probably can't convince them to use Signal.
gollark: I already have a bit of trouble communicating with some friends because they're on WhatsApp.
gollark: I mean, so far, I'm trying to avoid cloud stuff by running most of my services locally, but I have to interact with cloudy stuff to actually communicate with people, and regardless of what I do there'll be all kinds of shadowy data mining going on.

References
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