Boman Desai
Boman Desai is the author of two previous novels, The Memory of Elephants and Trio. The latter is a novel biography of the Schumanns and Brahms, which was awarded the Kirkus star and listed among their Best Books of 2016. The book was subsequently transcribed into an opera, titled "Clara." Desai has won about a dozen awards and taught fiction at Truman College, Roosevelt University, and the University of Southern Maine. He is also a composer, with a symphony and piano and violin concertos to his credit.
By dramatizing the high-voltage, yet tender, minds of three legendary musicians, Boman Desai has written a When We Cease to Understand the World for nineteenth-century classical music. Desai knows his subject well and integrates music into character—or is it character into music? Those readers well-versed in Romantic symphonic music might see analogues in the speech of characters, maybe in their imagined gaits through Central European towns, but certainly in how Brahms metabolizes the vicissitudes of life and translates them into the electrical storm that becomes his Fourth Symphony.