The Last Movement: A Novel

New York, 1911. Gustav Mahler’s recent tenure conducting the New York Philharmonic has been an extraordinary success and a time of feverish artistic defiance. He is arguably the most celebrated musician alive. In America, however, his compositions have turned more inward-looking, for he knows, or suspects, that death is near.

This slim, swift “triumph” of a novel finds him crossing the Atlantic, wrapped ...