With superb artistry and startling intimacy, the celebrated Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty brings us into the life of Catherine McKenna -- estranged daughter, vexed lover, new mother, and a woman composer making her mark in a male-dominated field. On the remote island of Islay she struggles for her artistic life in the midst of a relationship gone dangerously wrong. In Glasgow she becomes a mother and later composes a largescale symphonic work to celebrate her child. And in her hometown in Northern Ireland she returns to bury a difficult father, forge a tentative peace with her mother, and confront the ghosts of a constricting past. Hers is, in part, a very modern spiritual journey from superstition to sensibility.

In Grace Notes the music of MacLaverty's prose and his harmonious vision of one woman's life combine to create a novel of great delicacy and tensile strength. It is a book that the Virginia Woolf of A Room of One's Own would instantly understand.