num_pages: 240
description: For three years Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago but her husband Bowen an executive at a car company has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. He resists even when his mother arrives from the southwestern Chinese region of Yunnan and begins her own campaign for a grandchild. As tension in the household rises it becomes harder for Song Yan to keep her usual placid demeanor especially since she is troubled by dreams of a doorless room she cant escape populated only by a strange orange mushroom.When a parcel of mushrooms native to her mother-in-laws province is delivered seemingly by mistake Song Yan sees an opportunity to bond with her and as the packages continue to arrive every week the women stir-fry and grill the mushrooms adding them to soups and noodles. When a letter arrives in the mail from the sender of the mushrooms Song Yans world begins to tilt further into the surreal. Summoned to an uncanny seemingly ageless house hidden in a hutong that sits in the middle of the congested city she finds Bai Yu a once world-famous pianist who disappeared ten years ago.
language: English
title: Ghost Music
publisher: Grove Press