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

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.

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

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

'[The] novel's celebration of ordinariness and anonymity ... it's a quiet and even melancholic vision ...Cooper gives us chronology without event, people without relationships, art without identification, agglomeration without purpose. And so we are forced to focus on what's left - the structure of a life story, mediated through art, but not redeemed by it.'
-- Clair Wills, New York Review of Books (praise for Brian)

'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)

'A novel of simmering cinephilia.... Told in close third person, Brian unfolds neutrally and with little at stake, the frictionless description of the extremely circumscribed life of its protagonist often segueing to plot synopses and analyses of the scores of movies he takes in.'
-- Melissa Anderson, Bookforum (praise for Brian)

'I don't think I've ever felt such warmth for a character, or that I've been able to see cinema through another's eyes in such a lucid, sustained way. As Brian moves further and further into a life of moviegoing, ordering his days, and then years, around it, he finds companionship and a calm sense of wellbeing. As I read this beautifully subtle novel, I found the same.'
-- Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night (praise for Brian)

'After having published his luminous Ash Before Oak, Jeremy Cooper now brings us Brian, equally a work of mysterious interiority and poetry. It confirms that however solitary life might be, art enriches both our imaginations and our realities. This is a very tender book.'
-- Xiaolu Guo, author of A Lover's Discourse (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.