An eerie ability is passed from grandmother to grandson—who now must reckon with a new cacophony of voices and sounds, all from the past, overlaying his life in the present—in this stirring new novel from one of the UK’s most exciting young writers.

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift—an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past.

When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty—or impossibility—of living with the past.