Bookshelf (non-musical edition)

Edna O'Brien's novelistic response to the unmasking and trial of Radovan Karadžić is as astonishing and harrowing as everyone says it is. To quote James Wood's review in The New Yorker: "What is extraordinary and unsettling about O’Brien’s novel is the way that it begins in an atmosphere of something approaching pastoral comedy, and steadily darkens as we become acquainted with the buried but unrepressed war crimes of the town’s resident trickster. It is like watching a blush turn into the red of murderous fury: it seems impossible that the same mild medium could be so brutally weaponized." The final sentence of the book contains the words "savage music," and they suffice to describe O'Brien's achievement.