Music to my ears.

Last week my book group met to talk about anything except books since none of us had read the right text.
Still, we passed a pleasant couple of hours in the local pub and as we prepared to leave we thought we'd better sort out a book for next time just to keep up appearances...

Clare was the first to proffer a title:
"My husband has given me a copy of The Piano Room", she said, "he thinks we'll love it."
There were the inevitable questions. How long is it? What's it about?
I typed into my phone and read aloud from the Amazon site:

"The last thing that Lucy Aybrams, a carefree Californian undergraduate at Oxford University sees, before quicklime sears her corneas, is a human anklebone swinging from the fallen roof of a road-protest tunnel in the English countryside."

Lots of aghast faces. Clare looked surprised. We're pretty open minded and I love a good thriller but it didn't sound like something Clare's husband would suggest. Still we dutifully wrote down the title and author and all said we'd try to read it.

Later that evening we had an email from Clare.
It wasn't, in fact, called The Piano Room.
It was called The Music Room, by William Fiennes:
"The bestselling author of The Snow Geese returns with a mesmerizing, heartstopping tribute to his older brother and the house in which they grew up."

Not a swinging human anklebone in sight.