The Noise of Time

In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return. So begins Julian Barnes´s first novel since his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. A story about the collision of Art and Power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage. The novel imagines its way into the internal life of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich - one of the most controversial figures of 20th-century music. Set in Soviet Russia, the novel reverberates with tragedy, suspicion and drama.