“Not just a novel about music, but a musical novel. The story is told in three parts, merging like a triad" (The Times). For the first time in Russian - the latest work of the famous Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize, one of the brightest and most original prose writers of modern Britain, author of such international bestsellers as "England, England ", "Flaubert's Parrot", "Love and so on", "Premonition of the End" and many others. This time, “by far the most elegant stylist and the most unpredictable master of all imaginable literary forms” turns to the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, and in the anniversary year: in September 2016, the whole world will celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of the great Russian composer. However, writing a fictionalized biography worries Barnes the least, and he aims much higher: having as an artist a license for any fantasy, in love with Russian literature and an excellent command of the context, he builds his structure on the shaky soil of Soviet history, full of silences and half-truths...