In his first novel since Cal, here is a compact, luminous, and altogether masterful portrait of a woman composer and the complex interplay between her life and her art.

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.

Composer Catherine McKenna has more of a gift for music than happiness, but she has long been driven beyond harmonies (musical and personal) that her Belfast family can understand. Bernard MacLaverty renders both sides of the equation: Catherine's feminist and aesthetic striving and her mother's more traditional grasp; it's hard not to sympathize with Mrs. McKenna's impatient rejoinder, "You don't cope with music, you listen to it."

Grace Notes, MacLaverty's first novel since Cal, is as much about Irish identity--and possibility--as it is about art. Catherine's newest piece, a mass, includes the huge drums Protestants play in parades. "It was a scary sound--like thunder. Like the town was under a canopy of dark noise." Though her fellow Catholics see the drums as instruments of threat, Catherine is determined to integrate them into her composition.

Her return to Belfast for her father's funeral brings back several ghosts, among them an influential professor who spoke of grace notes--"the notes between the notes." This novel is full of such instances, wry snatches of conversation and unforgettable observations: the new Chinese restaurant that has had to offer chips to stay in business, or the pub that's "on a slight hill. When dogs pissed at the door the dark lines ran diagonally to the gutter." These transcend the occasional passage in which MacLaverty tries too hard to see into the life and rhythms of a female artist. The final section, however, a live radio concert of Catherine's piece, is a triumph for both woman composer and male author.

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