When Music—the ageless, androgynous being beside humanity since the first stories—dies in a London flat, the world wakes to a hush it can’t name.
Tobias Tam Staghorn, thirty-two, Associate Professor of Old-World Communicative Devices at Birmingham University, is meant to catalogue relics. Instead, he chases a pattern through parlour guitars, a ‘telephone desk’ that sings, and hand-drums that once called the spirits—across Barcelona auction rooms, the canals and lecture halls of the Midlands, and snug pubs along the Thames. With Marion of Putney and the ghost of her beloved saxman, Stevie and Daisy who can still ‘see,’ restorer Lily and her serene assistant Troy, and a guarded trauma doctor, he follows one perilous rule: if the right tones are named and the right stories are voiced, what was erased might be called back. As institutions circle and Music flickers at the edge of forgetting, Tobias must decide what to save: a field, a career, or the part of the human heart that hums. The Day Music Died is Book 1 of Tobias & Stuart (a trilogy). One on-page intimate scene, minimal violence, occasional strong language.
Tobias Tam Staghorn, thirty-two, Associate Professor of Old-World Communicative Devices at Birmingham University, is meant to catalogue relics. Instead, he chases a pattern through parlour guitars, a ‘telephone desk’ that sings, and hand-drums that once called the spirits—across Barcelona auction rooms, the canals and lecture halls of the Midlands, and snug pubs along the Thames. With Marion of Putney and the ghost of her beloved saxman, Stevie and Daisy who can still ‘see,’ restorer Lily and her serene assistant Troy, and a guarded trauma doctor, he follows one perilous rule: if the right tones are named and the right stories are voiced, what was erased might be called back. As institutions circle and Music flickers at the edge of forgetting, Tobias must decide what to save: a field, a career, or the part of the human heart that hums. The Day Music Died is Book 1 of Tobias & Stuart (a trilogy). One on-page intimate scene, minimal violence, occasional strong language.
- For readers who like concept-as-character mythology
For readers who like academia-meets-mystery
For readers who like queer slow burn
For readers who like intergenerational found family
For readers who like instruments with secrets
Genre: Urban Fantasy
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Used availability for Jern Tonkoi's The Day Music Died