Music can appear in different ways in books – it might be as straightforward as a character being a musician or composer, or a description of what they choose to listen or dance to. Or sometimes a novel’s title namechecks a particular song – Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars takes its name from a Portishead track, for example, and David Mitchell’s number9dream from a song by John Lennon.  

Musical choices will likely tell us something important about someone’s personality and the world they inhabit, or it’ll evoke a certain mood, emotion or moment in time. Music sometimes shapes stories in more subtle ways, too – depending on what the author or translator is listening to when they’re writing, say, or their own musical background and ambitions.  

Kazuo Ishiguro started out writing songs, rather than novels, while Shehan Karunatilaka has been described as someone who’d have been as at home on stage at Glastonbury as he was on the Booker Prize stage. Music has had a profound effect on Jon Fosse’s writing style: ‘I suddenly stopped playing and started writing, and when writing I somehow tried to recreate the mood or atmosphere created while playing music.’

It’s not unusual for a translator to liken their work to that of a musician. Daniel Bowles, translator of Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash, says that, as a lifelong pianist, there’s something about translation for him that ‘resembles working with a musical score: trying to render the sound, timbre, dynamics, and formal shapes of the original into a coherent performance.’ 

Listening to music can also be a key part of a translator’s research. David Boyd explained that he and his co-translator Sam Bett came up with a shared soundtrack to help them establish a common language when they were working together on Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven.  

Music can enhance the reading experience, too. As with translators, it can be a way for us to dive into characters’ worlds. Writers sometimes even gift their readers a playlist to accompany their novels, like Georgi Gospodinov for Time Shelter. 

If you’re a music lover – and as the UK’s summer of music festivals kicks off – we think you’ll enjoy this collection of Booker-nominated novels, each with music close to its heart.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith 

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017, Swing Time is a dazzling and energetic story about friendship, music and identity.  

Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about Black bodies and Black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s.  

But, as Sarah Shaffi writes in her guide to the author’s best books, this is a Zadie Smith novel and the past is never the past. Both characters can’t quite let go, even as they move on with their lives: Tracey becomes a West End dancer while the narrator goes to work for Aimee, a Madonna-like mega-celebrity who wants to open a school for girls in the Gambia (cue an exploration of the familiar Smith themes of class and privilege).  

For both the main characters, and for Smith, music is very important – it gives Swing Time its rhythm and propulsion. 

Jazz etc by John Murray 

John Murray was longlisted for the Booker in 2003 for this hard-to-categorise tale about jazz, Cumbria and dictator-era Portugal that’s sprinkled with a touch of magic realism.  

Vince Mori, an Italian Cumbrian, is a very passionate man – obsessed with women, the clarinet, and his trad jazz band, the Chompin’ Stompers. His son, Enzo, is obsessed with only one woman – his brilliant Oxford contemporary and a world-famous guitarist, Fanny Golightly. Unfortunately, single-minded Fanny only has eyes for Portuguese musical legend Toto Cebola. 

The novel is nominally about jazz and love, but Murray uses music as 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 seller who speaks in an Italian-Cumbrian argot. 

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood 

Twenty-year-old Thomas Flett lives in a coastal town in northern England. Here, he works as a shanker, harvesting shrimp from the tidal flats by horse and cart, as his grandfather did before him. It’s backbreaking work. 

After long days on the sands, Thomas comes home to his guitar. For him, music offers a sanctuary: an escape from work and expectation. This story echoes much of author Benjamin Wood’s own youth, when he wrote music from the tender age of 14: ‘In my younger days, I wanted to be a singer-songwriter,’ he told Strand Magazine, recalling the folk clubs he played as a teenager. 

Wood entwines Thomas’s songs with English folk traditions, the rhythms of the coast and the pull of the tides. His ambition is inseparable from the community that shaped him, and in between the lines, Seascraper explores the relationship between place, identity and art. 

While writing, Wood composed an original song, also titled ‘Seascraper’, to better understand Thomas’s voice, and later made it available to listen to on his website. By the novel’s end, Thomas prepares to perform it, carrying the connection between word and song beyond the page. 

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann 

Kairos is a novel where music becomes the language of love. Set in East Berlin between 1986 and 1992, it follows the intense and often destructive affair between 19-year-old student Katharina and Hans, a writer 34 years her senior. 

Katharina and Hans bond over a shared love of classical music, opera and art. Hans, an intellectual, introduces Katharina to new composers and recordings, which forms part of the complex dynamic between mentor and lover. They listen to Mozart, Bach and Chopin, among others; all of whom reflect the artistic landscape that shapes their relationship. For Katharina, it opens a doorway into a world of possibility, while for Hans it represents a connection to a cultural world he fears is disappearing with the collapse of the GDR. Jenny Erpenbeck weaves music throughout, using it as a marker of time and change against the backdrop of a crumbling political system. 

Translated from German by Michael Hofmann, Kairos won the International Booker Prize 2024. ‘It starts with love and passion, but it’s at least as much about power, art and culture,’ said chair of judges Eleanor Wachtel in her speech at the prize ceremony, where she described the novel as ‘both beautiful and uncomfortable, personal and political’. 

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel 

Winner of the International Booker Prize in 2023, Time Shelter introduces readers to a ‘clinic for the past’, run by an enigmatic therapist. The clinic offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time to a familiar, safer, happier moment.  

Our judges described the book as an ‘inventive, subversive and morbidly humorous novel about national identities and the seductive dangers of memory and nostalgia’.  

Music – and its power to awaken memories – is an important theme. Sharing a playlist to accompany the novel, Gospodinov explained: ‘Music can be “heard” in many places throughout it. First, because music awakens memory. Researchers claim that musical structures leave our memories last. Until the very end, a piano plays in our heads […] In the clinics of the past, Gaustine and the narrator constantly use music’s superpower; various emblematic songs take us back to particular years.’  

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James 

Jamaica, 1976. Seven gunmen storm Bob Marley’s house, machine guns blazing. The reggae superstar survives, but the gunmen are never caught. Marlon James explores the story behind this near-mythical event. The result is a mesmerising, continent-crossing tale that spans three decades, with a shadowy cast of street kids, drug lords, journalists, prostitutes, politicians, gunmen and secret service agents.  

A Brief History of Seven Killings won the Booker Prize in 2015. According to fellow Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo, ‘Marlon James is one of the most energetically imaginative novelists around’ and his 700-page epic should be your next read if you’re looking for something ‘wild and rebellious’. 

Music is, perhaps unsurprisingly, central to the book, especially Jamaican reggae and dancehall. James picked a playlist to accompany the novel for New York Public Radio, including Bob Marley & The Wailers’ song Ambush in the Night. 

Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty 

Shortlisted for the Booker in 1997, Bernard MacLaverty’s lyrical novel is about coming to terms with the past and the healing power of music. 

Arriving back in Belfast for her father’s funeral, Catherine McKenna – a successful young composer – remembers exactly why she left: the claustrophobic intimacies of the Catholic enclave, her fastidious, nagging mother, and the tensions of a city at war with itself. She remembers a more innocent time, when the Loyalists’ drums sounded mysterious and exciting. She remembers her shattered relationship with the drunken, violent Dave. She remembers the child she had with him, waiting for her back in Glasgow. 

In musical notation, grace notes are printed smaller in size. They’re not essential but rather a kind of musical ornamentation, the ‘notes between the notes’ as MacLaverty calls them in the novel. 

Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes, translated by Frank Wynne 

An audacious and compelling social satire, writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes’ novel casts a penetrating light on the dark underbelly of modern urban life. 

When the friend who had been covering his rent selfishly dies, Vernon, a struggling record shop owner, finds himself out on the Paris streets. But as he begs from strangers, a throwaway comment on social media is taking the internet by storm.  

Word is out: Vernon Subutex possesses the last filmed recordings of music star Alex Bleach, who recently died of a drug overdose. Suddenly a horde of dubious characters, from record producers to porn stars, are all on Vernon’s trail. 

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018, this is a story of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll at its best and worst.   

Compass by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell 

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories. He revisits his life: his travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus and Tehran; the various writers, artists, musicians, academics and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape.  

At the centre of these memories is an elusive, unrequited love – Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the perpetual tension between Europe and the Middle East.  

As a review of Mathias Énard’s ‘strangely powerful work’ explains, ‘Orientalism is, here, the key idea – our narrator, Franz, has worked on the appropriation of Middle Eastern music by canonical westerners, as well as music written by Middle Eastern composers in the western tradition’. 

Énard’s immersive, nocturnal, musical journey was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2017.  

The Chimes by Anna Smaill 

Both The Chimes and her poetry collection, The Violinist in Spring, hint at Anna Smaill’s first love: for years she studied the violin with the intention of becoming a professional performer. 

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, The Chimes explores a world where the written word has been replaced by music and memories are carried as physical objects. 

In a reimagined London, memory is forbidden by the Order, whose vast musical instrument, the Carillon, renders the population amnesiac. An orphaned young man discovers he has a gift that could change all of this forever.  

Slowly, inexplicably, Simon is beginning to remember – to wake up. He and his friend Lucien travel to the Order’s stronghold in Oxford, where they learn that nothing they ever believed about their world is true. 

Orfeo by Richard Powers 

Longlisted for the Booker in 2014, Orfeo tells the story of a musician journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present. 

One evening, 70-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens his front door to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab – the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to discover musical patterns in DNA strands – has come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked, Els flees and turns fugitive. In response, the government promises a terrified nation that the ‘Bioterrorist Bach’ will be found and brought to trial. 

The novel’s Booker nomination came as a surprise to its author, Richard Powers: ‘Orfeo was longlisted in the first year that Americans were eligible, which made for a distinctive surprise. The Booker had always taken place on a parallel Earth for us, until there we were in the middle of it. That’s why my longlisting came as a double bolt from the blue.’ 

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan 

In the aftermath of the fall of Paris in 1940, a rising star on the cabaret scene was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. Hieronymous Falk was 20 years old. He was a German citizen. And he was Black.  

Fifty years later, Chip persuades Sid, Hiero’s bandmate and the only witness that day, to return to Berlin. But Sid discovers there’s more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero’s fate was settled. 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2011, Half Blood Blues explores loyalty, betrayal and the horror that, if you don’t tell your story, someone else might. And they just might tell it wrong. 

In an interview about the book, Esi Edugyan described some of her inspirations: ‘Music, certainly, and not only jazz. Schubert is often playing in my office when I’m working. The exquisite sculptural drawings of faces by British artist Alison Lambert. Cooking. And now, it seems, my daughter.’