Discord - by Jeremy Cooper (Paperback)

About the Book

Charting the course of the intense and at times fractious relationship between middle-aged composer Rebekah Rosen and the young star-saxophonist Evie Bennet, Discord is a wry and insightful exploration of creative collaboration.

Book Synopsis

Jeremy Cooper, the author of Brian, returns with Discord, a subjective journey through the world of classical music. On a night in August, an audience at the Royal Albert Hall attends the first ever concert of Distant Voices. The Proms performance is the culmination of a year's work between the middle-aged composer Rebekah Rosen and the young star-saxophonist Evie Bennet. Alternating between both perspectives, Discord charts the course of their intense and at times fractious relationship, the resonances and dissonances both women find within one another, as well as the struggles and satisfactions that accompany an artistic life. At the heart of the novel is an inquiry into the generative force behind creative collaboration. In what ways does the inexpressible - that amorphous space of friction and unity between musicians - become indelible? And by what process do flawed individuals create works of transcendence? Deeply insightful, at turns poignant and wry, Discord affirms Jeremy Cooper's status as one of the most interesting fiction writers at work today.

Review Quotes

'Brian is affecting, funny and, at 184 pages, a skilfully compressed chronicle of one man's life and the cornucopia of film that enriches it.'
-- Max Liu, Financial Times (praise for Brian)

'Although the novel twinkles with humour, Cooper never signposts what we should think; his crisply managed scenes, borne chiefly on drifting tides of thought and memory, let us draw our own conclusions about the characters' crisscrossing temperaments.... His unsolemn yet wholly unsatirical treatment of his characters' seriousness is key (as in Brian) to the powerful emotion Discord generates.... And for a book without a plot, our anticipation is electric when, with 40 pages to go, we realize we're still weeks away from the performance; the ending, when it finally comes, is exquisitely poised.'
-- Anthony Cummins, The Observer

'Cooper charts the ebb and flow of the women's relationship with meticulous precision [and] richly conveys the intricacies of artistic collaboration.'
-- Micheal Arditti, Spectator

'Cooper does a superb job of inhabiting this singular character's point of view, and of deftly weaving into the narrative Brian's thoughts and feelings about the films he sees. I was delighted by the book's gentle humor and lucid prose style, and I can think of no finer exploration of what can happen when a person is fully open and attentive to art, and how a shared passion for art can connect people to one another.'
-- Sigrid Nunez, New Yorker (praise for Brian)

'Cooper's novels remind us that an artistic life is all about practice, a way of living: observation, questions, uncertainty.... As a material existence, an artistic life offers little more than the aesthetic trappings of bourgeois security; but as a practice, an artistic life is one of risk, chance, missed opportunities, discordant notes.... The success of the public performance that frames the novel's trajectory and marks its climax, stands alongside the narrative of a more complex artistic journey for both characters that asks whether success and failure are even the right weights with which to balance the value of artistic practice.'
-- Thomas Chadwick, Review31

'Discord charts the collaboration - Rebekah at the piano, Evie on her saxophones - and their resulting conflicts over matters such as reconciling the personal and the musical, devotion to craft and how art should recognize and respond to the wider world.... Cooper offers a hopeful view, hinting that creativity may reside in exactly those gaps and imperfect connections - not just between artist and muse, notes and words, but between performer and audience, manuscript and concert hall, head and hand.'
-- Rachel Armitage, Literary Review

'Easily the best novel I've read this decade.'
-- Olivia Laing, Guardian (praise for Brian)

'I absolutely love Jeremy Cooper's writing.... His previous novel, Brian, was also superb, about a solitary man who decides to go to the BFI every night and watch whatever is there, and how film changes his life. This is also about art: a young female saxophonist and an older female composer work together on a project for the Proms. The composer is a procrastinator who finds it hard to engage with life. The saxophonist is vibrantly alive. Will their collaboration produce good music or just discord?'
-- Naomi Alderman, The Nerve

'In his mesmerizing 2023 novel Brian, Jeremy Cooper told the story of a reclusive middle-aged council worker who is rescued from loneliness by watching nightly screenings at the National Film Theatre.... The same transformative power is at work in Cooper's latest novel, Discord, but here the lived experience of art is seen from the inside... [As] the world premiere at the Royal Albert Hall approaches, and Cooper fills in his parallel narratives with common themes and leitmotifs in the two women's very different back stories, the reader begins to sense a kind of contrapuntal harmony underpinning their collaboration, and the significance of discord in music as well as in life.'
-- Hugh Barnes, Arts Desk

'It's very hard indeed to write fiction about music but Jeremy Cooper does so with triumphant aplomb. Discord is a tremendous, quietly enthralling achievement.'
-- William Boyd, author of The Predicament

'Jeremy Cooper's most recent books have amounted to a cogent and quietly fascinating project: to represent the day-to-day reality, and the consistent application required, of a serious artistic life.... In a largely jargon-free but erudite register, Cooper frames the endeavour of both committed artists as they struggle to execute the ideas in their heads. He avoids the clichés of an "unlikely partnership" story.... If they change one another, it's in barely perceptible ways, the most subtle and ambiguous of which is saved for the final cadence: just the right amount of imperfect. This is a working relationship that is peripatetic and fleeting, but which, for a while at least, alters both lives.'
-- Jonathan McAloon, Financial Times

'Jeremy Cooper's Discord is as nakedly truthful a novel as you could ever hope to read. Its characters are completely and utterly convincing and their interactions with one another are filled with all of the loveliness and foolishness and tenderness of real life.'
-- Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, author of The End of Nightwork

'Quietly, irresistibly compelling. Jeremy Cooper's interior worlds fill you up, become the air around you, conduct the sounds of every day - while you are reading, and while the book waits for you to pick it up again. Discord is an enthralling human melody.'
-- Ben Pester, author of The Expansion Project

'There's a strange magic to Jeremy Cooper's writing. The way he puts words together creates an incantatory effect. Reading him is to be spellbound, then. I have no idea how he does it, only that I am seduced.'
-- Ben Myers, author of The Offing (praise for Brian)

'What makes Jeremy Cooper's seventh novel appealing and convincing is the author's serene prose and tender, understated empathy.... This is an affectionate, thoughtful portrait of a gentle soul.'
-- David Collard, Times Literary Supplement (praise for Brian)

About the Author

Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of seven previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum's catalogue of artists' postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC's Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Ash before Oak.