John Murray’s love for all thing jazz shines through this engaging tale of an eternal triangle in a cosmopolitan music scene
John Murray
John Murray, a hard-to-categorise novelist, was longlisted for a hard-to-categorise tale of jazz, Cumbria and dictator-era Portugal – a linguistic riff with a touch of magic realism.
Murray’s novel, shot through with humour, is nominally about jazz and love but he finds in the musical style a metaphor for all sorts of other things too – for life, sex, conversation. He also has fun with accents (one character is an ice-cream salesman who speaks in an Italian-Cumbrian argot). Murray is himself a linguist; he studied Sanskrit at university and currently lives in Greece where he runs creative-writing courses and blogs about a random selection of topics. He was a publisher for a while and was responsible for the first book by another Booker longlistee, Julia Darling.