In Summers’ novel, an elderly woman looks back on the moments—good and bad—that have made up her long life.

Nobody pays any mind to people like Birdie. Brought up on the Bible in the small town of Ophelia, Indiana, she reflects on her near-century of life and the “forever days” when she was truly happy, before various reckonings came. She recalls her childhood as the youngest of five children; her marriage to her husband, Slick; her days overhearing secrets as an operator in her town’s telephone office; and her time spent watching her favorite niece, Jenny, grow up. Birdie describes her world in visceral detail, moving between accounts of her youth as a white girl in a place where lynchings of Black residents were commonplace and her final, dying days. Summers’ novel works to unpack her memories and the layers of denial she’s constructed around them. Birdie creates a version of reality for herself in which she’s privy to every secret, but when her own truths become too uncomfortable, she backs away with the declaration, “I don’t want to know so much.” She denies that her husband is gay, and she denies that he is dying. She denies, for as long as she can, the harm that was done to her when she was a child. Only after she passes on these truths to her niece is she ready to say goodbye to the world.

Bird motifs run rampant throughout Summers’ novel. Birdie declares that she can talk to them, and she uses them as a way to process her world; the feelings she avoids come into stark relief in such lines as “the birds were never right during the second war. You can’t have an entire world trying to kill each other and not expect the birds to feel it.” This element returns in the novel’s final pages, in which Birdie accepts her end with an image of birds that “have been flying into windows here all day.” Birdie and Slick’s marriage was considered “mixed” because one was Baptist and the other Catholic, and Summers effectively ties ideas about religion, like so much else in the book, to grief. Birdie lost her own father very young, and as her husband lies dying in the hospital, she refuses to recite Catholic rites, for fear of hastening his demise. Looking back on her niece’s childhood, she realizes that she “started to mourn little Jenny as though she had died,” even though all she did was grow up. Overall, Birdie is shown to be a complex and imperfect narrator: At one moment, her memory is so strong she can “smell the grass in it”; at another, she reflects that it’s “funny what you don’t remember.” For every moment of fond nostalgia, there’s another that rejects the past, and for each instance of keen insight, there’s one that forces readers to question their sympathy. The result is a gradual immersion into the thoughts and memories that make up a full life.

An absorbing and vividly rendered journey through a lifetime.

Summers’ speculative novel imagines: What if Mozart had not died at the age of 35?

Framed as a memoir written in 1823, the narrative begins in 1791 with the composer, sick with fever in Vienna, having his life mysteriously saved by a Romani woman. Mozart duly resumes churning out symphonies and hit operas while developing a love-hate rivalry with the young Ludwig van Beethoven. In 1799, he moves to London to be King George III’s court composer, whereupon his wife, Konstanze, leaves him; she reveals that she’s acquired a venereal disease from another man and passed it on to her husband. Mozart arrives at court but is fired when one of his concerts exacerbates the King’s madness. He then sets sail for America, but unwittingly books passage on a slave-trading ship and is emotionally traumatized by the atrocities he sees (“I screamed continually for the beating to stop…. My own spirit felt like I was receiving the lash”). Arriving in New York, he gets support from wealthy music lover John Jacob Astor, who builds him an opera house. Even better, he falls in love with Astor’s servant, Alice, a Black woman who turns out to be a great soprano; she bears him a son, but racist social mores (and the fact that he’s already married) prevent them from marrying. Mozart keeps fighting for racial justice—he spars with Thomas Jefferson over the immorality of slavery and receives racist death threats after he casts Alice and another Black singer in an opera.

The author is a pianist, conductor, and the artistic and music director of Houston Grand Opera. His ruminative yarn ranges luxuriantly over every aspect of Mozart’s life, from his fraught relationship with his father, Leopold, to his prodigious output—he writes six symphonies in a few weeks—to the carping of singers and clarinetists who complain that his music is too difficult. Mozart the showman would love the melodramatic plot, but the downside is that historical figures sometimes act markedly out of character (it’s hard to believe that the arrogant Beethoven would ever ask for Mozart’s help with his compositions), and the period details are sometimes wildly off (Summers has Mozart’s ship sailing 3,000 miles from Liverpool to West Africa in four days and has President Jefferson say, “We do not even have a national bank yet!” at a time when the United States had a national bank). But Summers’ depiction of Mozart, with his mix of vulgarity and sensitivity, is shrewd and well drawn, and the author gives him elegant, penetrating psychological insights. (“You were in a constant state of waiting,” he muses of Leopold, who relentlessly choreographed his early career, “like an alchemist who has put all of his elements together but had yet to know their outcome—you waited, always, for gold.”) Summers’ prose is especially pithy and evocative in conveying Mozart’s spot-on musical perceptions: “Staring at the score of Ludwig’s cantata, I thought his music was screaming at God, when composers should let God speak through them. [His] music was just too much of everything. Too much emotion. Too many contrasts.” Mozart fans—and even Beethoven partisans—will find much to relish here.

An entertaining if far-fetched might-have-been featuring a richly textured portrait of musical genius.

A retired pianist and his distant mother reflect on their complicated relationships to music and each other in Summers’ literary novel.

Joey was one of classical music’s most famous pianists, but he hasn’t performed publicly in 10 years. Since leaving the stage, he has lived in near anonymity in Australia with his son, Little Ben, whom he fathered with the help of Claire, the twin sister of his former lover and partner, Ben. Joey’s success in music is largely due to the sacrifices made by his mother, Alta, an accomplished singer in her own right. The widowed Alta lives in Texas, convinced that she’s squandered her talents on behalf of her son’s, only for him to throw everything away by retiring before the age of 50. The lives of the son and his mother—long separate and private—have recently been disrupted by a publisher working on a biography of the great pianist. “I just don’t think what I actually know will be of interest to anyone,” Joey reflects dismissively. “What they all will want is an intemperate account of invented controversies. Gratitude and precision have no drama, either in life or at the piano.” Even so, both Joey and Alta begin to write down their memories, with the intention of turning them over as fodder for the anonymous biographer. As Alta movingly reflects on her years training Joey, as well as her secret lovers and her lost sense of purpose, Joey incisively examines his complicated relationships with his family of origin and chosen family, as well as with the music whose presence and absence have defined his life. The story is told in brief alternating chapters, many only a page or two in length. Summers skillfully limns the inner lives of both narrators, particularly that of Alta. “It wasn’t all that nonsense about ‘making love’ to a piano that I occasionally read in some of those ridiculous articles or reviews,” she writes of Joey, “but he did connect with something elemental in the playing of music.” Chapter by chapter, a complicated and haunting duet emerges.

A deeply felt novel about the way pain feeds art—and vice versa.