Clara

'A gripping narrative - a deeply moving study of love, loss and solitude' Independent on Sunday'A gripping narrative - a deeply moving study of love, loss and solitude' Independent on SundayCelebrated nineteenth-century concert pianist and composer, editor and teacher, friend of Brahms - Clara Schumann was also the wife of Robert Schumann, the mother of his eight children, and the woman who cared for him through a series of crippling mental illnesses.A lyrical and vibrant account of two remarkable and highly dramatic musical careers, Clara is a novel about timeless, common things- about the inescapable influences of childhood, about creativity and marital life, about communication and silence, about how art is made and how art, in turn, may erode or save the life that nourishes it.'Some of the greatest words ever written on thwarted love since Romeo and Juliet' The Times

Short-listed for Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award 2003 Short-listed for Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award 2002

“Some of the greatest words ever written on thwarted love since Romeo and Juliet”

Some of the greatest words ever written on thwarted love since Romeo and Juliet The Times
A powerful novel which brings two troubled and brilliant people back to life Sunday Telegraph
A razor-sharp blade of light... This is fiction's raising of Lazarus, miraculous, touched with wonder, grace and utter, steadfast belief in the life being resurrected... A work of intense, unflinching passion and conviction, written with Galloway's heart's blood The Times
Janice Galloway's exciting, vibrant third novel proves a virtuoso piece of storytelling...this obvious Booker contender is as compelling as the tormented players and music that inspired it -- Eileen Battersby Irish Times
You read Clara and you catch the music of another mind, and wherever it comes from Janice Galloway plays the notes to what sounds very much like perfection. This is a virtuoso performance Scotsman
A novel dizzy with lyrical passages and pulsating with the musical passion of Clara's complicated, tragic love for her husband Robert Schumann Scotland on Sunday
Her limpid prose style is so seductive and so beautiful a fine meditation on art, love and loss... Meaghan Delahunt, The Scotsman

Janice Galloway's first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, now widely regarded as a Scottish contemporary classic, was published in 1990 and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. Her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters EM Forster Award while her third, Clara, about the tempestuous life of nineteenth-century pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, won the Saltire Award in 2002. Collaborative texts include an opera with Sally Beamish and three cross-discipline works with Anne Bevan, the Orcadian sculptor. Her 'anti-memoir', This is not about me, was published by Granta in September 2008 to universal critical acclaim. She lives in Lanarkshire

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