How to uncover from biographical details the mystery that is music? With precision, heart-breaking beauty and lyric insight, Ruth Padel performs a miracle: Beethoven comes alive before us, the son of a drunk, who became a genius, and lost everything, and found his way back to the center. And here we are, following Padel's own genius for composing the music of a story via lyrical means. You will find your heart shored up / by meeting the trapped brilliance of his eyes, she writes. Indeed

Vividly beautiful

Poetry, biography, music and memoir collide in this wonderful collection from Ruth Padel... A tender and evocative portrait of the man and his music, and most of all the profound ways it affects listeners and performers

Padel's imagery and imagination took me deeper into Beethoven than many biographies I've read... Padel knows her history. But a poet is free to inhabit her subject and elaborate on the record

What a wonderful and unusual idea. Ruth Padel writes with true passion; her love for, and understanding of, the man and his music shine through each poem

Beethoven’s music encompasses the entire blinding spectrum of human thought and emotion, from violent to ethereal, from chaos to sublimity. Ruth Padel’s poems encompass that uncontainable spirit to an astounding degree, and preserve the primal shock of our first hearing

Breathtaking

An honest, educational and downright hilarious memoir. It’s a deeply affectionate look at a much-maligned bit of Britishness that we simply couldn't live without

A gorgeously funny, deeply affectionate and fully costumed swallow-dive into the great – and historic – amateur theatrical tradition. I loved it

A hilarious, informative amdramoir – a love-letter to her father and a fascinating insight into the much maligned minority: the amateur

Highly entertaining... [Landreth] has cleverly - and wittily - conflated memoir with the history of am-dram, its practical application and a close look at some of our most venerable companies."

I thoroughly enjoyed this beguiling ensemble of memoir, social history, interviews and manifesto, which tells the story of am-dram in Britain

A touching and vivid nostalgia trip - with great photos

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A fond look back at the Wham! star's life in the group that helped define Eighties pop

Will no doubt appeal to the fanbase . . . Humorous and touching

Joyful nostalgia

As a hard-nosed ex-detective, it was a source of much hilarity that I am such a Wham! fan but my copy of this is a prized possession

A composer who can write as eloquently as he sings. A rare bird, indeed!

With our new-found love of wildlife, this book promises to lift the spirits of not just bird enthusiasts, but nature lovers, too.

The exuberance of folk-singer Sam Lee's The Nightingale is irresistible

A master storyteller