The hills only come back the same: I don’t mind … begins Kirsty Gunn’s The Big Music, a novel that takes us to a new understanding of how fiction can affect us.

Presented as a collection of found papers, appendices and notes, The Big Music tells the story of John Sutherland of ‘The Grey House’ who is dying and creating in the last days of his life a musical composition that will define it. Yet he has little idea of how his tune will echo or play out into the world – and as the book moves inevitably through its themes of death and birth, change and stasis, the sound of his solitary story comes to merge and connect with those around him.

In this work of fiction, Kirsty Gunn has created something as real as music or as a dream. Not so much a novel as a place the reader comes to inhabit and to know, The Big Music is a literary work of undeniable originality and power.

“The Big Music is a landscape; a work of longing fragments that collect on a journey and grow to light lands before, around, and after them. Haunting and spacious.”

“Like Faulkner, she has found a way to give voice to the voiceless and form to the formless. A remarkable achievement.

Why is it that in the English-speaking world it is nearly always women writers – Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Muriel Spark, Rosalind Belben, and now Kirsty Gunn – who understand, as composers have always understood, that we human beings are not solitary individuals facing the world but form part of a larger music, which may be intuited but can never be fully grasped?

We human beings are not solitary individuals, facing the world, as the English tradition of the novel would have us believe, but part of a larger whole, made up of fathers and sons, memories and hopes, half-heard melodies and landscapes imprinted on our minds. A narrative which caught this would remind us more of the Norse Sagas and William Faulkner than of Jane Austen and Anthony Powell. Kirsty Gunn’s remarkable novel, which seeks to give voice to the bleak loneliness of the Scottish Highlands by forging a very precise narrative equivalent of the highest form of traditional bagpipe music, does just that. It is a remarkable achievement.”