Books with great soundtracks

Fans of The National may have already clocked the title of August Thompson's debut, taken from a track from their album High Violet. But this is far from the only musical reference in a book that covers two decades of music, drugs and lust between Theron and best friend Jake, Thompson deftly depicting those formative years when music forms part of our identity: a way of expressing our individuality and also finding kinship. 

The lonely life of fifteen-year-old Theron David Alden is transformed when he meets Jake. Older, cooler, more confident and startlingly beautiful, Jake likes the same bands, the same drugs, and has the same drive to oblivion. Over the course of twenty years, Theron and Jake get high, drift apart, and are brought hurtling back together, until a final collision tears them apart forever. Theron wants Jake, and he wants to be Jake. But is Jake brave enough to want him back?

In They Dream in Gold, music isn't just a passion, it's a reason for being – the driving beat of the plot and in the hearts of our two leads. 

Bonnie and Mansour meet in New York, in 1968, and set about making music that will change the world. Mansour's fusion of Senegalese prayer songs and the wild beats of East Coast American jazz carries them to Paris, to Rio, and across Europe. They're on the verge of fame, of finally making it. And then Mansour disappears. Bonnie, pregnant with his child, sets out to find him. Her journey and their story takes us across the globe as we chart their once-in-a-lifetime love.

In Mandel's Station Eleven, performances of classical music are a flickering beacon in a world that has lost much of its previous civilisation's achievements, as the novel follows a troupe of actors and musicians around a United States decimated by a deadly pandemic.

One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage while performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a virus touches down in North America, and the world is never the same again. The carefully plotted time-slip narrative moves between the years before, during and after the virus kills 99.9% of the world's population. The Travelling Symphony journey across an almost-deserted United States, bringing a little joy to the settlements that have grown up since. But then they start to hear stories about a mysterious, and dangerous, Prophet.

A modern take on Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl pulses with music – with over sixty songs mentioned by name through the book. 

It’s 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a lesbian best friend, makes zines, and is a flâneur with a rich dating life. But Paul’s also got a secret: he’s a shapeshifter. Oscillating wildly from Riot Grrrl to leather cub, Women’s Studies major to trade, Paul transforms his body at will in a series of adventures that take him from Iowa City to Boystown to Provincetown and finally to San Francisco – a journey through the deep queer archives of struggle and pleasure.