He’s rented a cottage on a windswept part of the coast to write a commissioned piece, when he has his first flash of inspiration in years in the form of the haunting voice of a young punky singer named Nancy Flight. The resulting Angel Cantata is destined to be a classic. Which is all well and good but it doesn’t solve the impossibility of writing about music. This novel’s richness is in the layers of local history that awake Anders’s memories. It is interspersed with “images” by Ffiona Lewis; attractive but they don’t add to the story.