The Courage Consort - by Michel Faber (Paperback)

About the Book

In this novella, an a cappella vocal ensemble is sequestered in a Belgian chateau to rehearse a monstrously complicated new piece. But competing artistic temperaments and sexual needs create as much discordance as the avant-garde music.

Book Synopsis

With his elegant prose and perceptive imagination, the bestselling author of The Crimson Petal and the White creates a unique, self-contained world, where the perennial human drama plays out in all its passion and ambiguity. In these acclaimed novellas, Michel Faber takes on the interior world of inventively crafted characters. "The Courage Consort" tells of an a capella vocal ensemble sequestered in a Belgian chateau to rehearse a monstrously complicated new piece. But competing artistic temperaments and sexual needs create as much discordance as the avant-garde music. In "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps," a lonely woman joins an archaeological dig at Whitby Abbey and unearths a mystery involving a long-hidden murder. In "The Fahrenheit Twins," strange children, identical in all but gender and left alone at the icy zenith of the world by their anthropologist parents, create their own ritual civilization.

From the Back Cover

"The evocative language and intriguing glimpses of unfamiliar worlds that dazzled readers of The Crimson Petal and the White are here in abundance."--Los Angeles Times
Bestselling author Michel Faber has created unique dramas in these tender, wise, and often funny tales of isolated people in wholly original settings. Faber's rich imagination is keenly in play as his inventive characters come together to unearth a long-hidden murder mystery surrounding an ancient monument, work out artistic and sexual differences as they rehearse one of the most challenging musical pieces ever written, and create strange civilizations when left to their own devices.
"In all of these eerily beautiful tales, Faber's characters are bewildered solipsists, forced to piece together impenetrable worlds of blank pages, uncanny dissonances and subterranean emotions."--The New York Times Book Review
"The collection's haunting originality solidifies Faber's place among today's most versatile writers."--Time Out New York
Michel Faber is the author of the bestselling The Crimson Petal and the White, Some Rain Must Fall, and Under the Skin, a finalist for the Whitbread Award. His work has been published in twenty countries and received several literary awards. He lives in Scotland.

Review Quotes

U.K. PRAISE FOR THE COURAGE CONSORT
"His air of strange novelty is as fresh as ever; each sentence condenses the world into something surprising and illuminating." -The Guardian (London)
PRAISE FOR THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE
"Faber tells a good story grippingly and colorfully." -The Washington Post
"A lasting love affair; the intimate relationship one develops with the characters . . . is much more satisfying than the mere one-night stand promised by most other novels."-People

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