Two nice things happened yesterday. I popped into Waterstones in Princes Street to ask if they were going to stock my Nocturne book.
Lo and behold it was already on the ‘New NonFiction’ shelf, with its own little recommendation card (see photo).

An hour later my publisher sent the first review, on a Substack history and arts magazine called The Broken Compass, run by historian Matthew Lyons. What a pleasing day!

Nocturnes and the Fascination of Night Music
By Susan Tomes; Yale University Press

‘There are many passages of music in the Western canon that might be thought to evoke the calm of evening. But it took an Irish emigré in St Petersburg in the early years of the nineteenth century to invent a specific form. No-one seems to know quite what inspired the Dublin-born pianist and composer John Field to compose his first Nocturne – Tomes suggests it might have something to do with the two summer months in St Petersburg during which twilight’s soft luminescence could last all night – nor quite where the choice of name came from. Before Field’s intervention, the notturno, or nocturne, had been music to enliven an evening. Instead, he made it a short, lyrical piece of instrumental music that sought to conjure the night in sound.

Tomes is an award-winning musician as well as a writer. Her book traces the history of the Nocturne from those evenings in the city on the Baltic shore down to the modern day, bringing her expertise to bear to understand the music from the inside. But the book ranges more widely too, across the relationship between music and sleep, and the way that night and twilight both have inspired composers through the centuries. This is such a lovely idea for a book, and it’s executed wonderfully.’