Intermission

This fine if elusive novel about a jazz giant echoes his art in both its style and its story-telling.A novel as oblique, elusive but quietly hypnotic as its hero’s own playing. - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Captivating and hypnotic writing from a prize-winning novelist, whose prose is reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s and Paul Harding’s.

New York, June 1961. The Bill Evans Trio, featuring twenty-five year old Scott LaFaro on bass, play a series of concerts at the Village Vanguard that will go down in musical history. Shortly afterwards, LaFaro is killed in a car accident, and Evans disappears. Intermission tells the story of what happens next.

In measured, evocative prose, Intermission takes a period from the life of one of America’s great artists and fashions it into a fiction of extraordinary imaginative skill and ambition. The novel inhabits the lives of four people in orbit around a tragedy, presenting an intense and moving portrait of the burden of grief, and of a man lost to his family and to himself. It is also a conjuring of a pivotal moment in American music and culture, and a unique representation of the jazz scene in the early 1960s.

Intermission is a novel of pure control and power, certain to establish Owen Martell as one of the most promising young writers in Britain today.