An die Musik
The short, bright life of Franz Schubert
1797–1828
He was eleven, short even for eleven, and the only boy in the courtyard wearing grey. Thirteen chapters later he is dead at thirty-one, and a drawer holds a symphony nobody has heard.
Books
Full-length original books, written to be read on a screen — straight through, or a chapter at a time before sleep. Each one keeps your place, your text size, and your page colour.
Who Crosses
An epic fantasy in four volumes
Volumes I–IV
The pass over the mountains has been sealed in ice for three hundred years. Now the ice is breaking, something is walking east on the old road dragging a chain, and a beekeeper learns what her family's book of roads can do, and what it takes from whoever writes in it.
The Sea at the End of the Forest
A fantasy in four volumes
Volumes I–IV
After a great autumn storm, two brothers find the broken prow of a seagoing ship in the beech woods above their valley, beside a stream that runs the wrong way. When the elder follows it into the Great Wood and does not come back, the younger goes after him, with his grandmother's half-remembered road-song for a map.
Almond Blossom
The working life of Vincent van Gogh
1853–1890
A headstone at Groot-Zundert carries his name and a date a year before he was born. He was a picture dealer, then a preacher, and at twenty-seven sat down to learn to draw; ten years later his brother's widow had two hundred of his paintings and was advised to clear them off.
Songs My Mother Taught Me
The life of Antonín Dvořák
1841–1904
He was the son of a butcher who kept the inn below the castle at Nelahozeves, and at twenty-four he played viola in the pit on the first night of The Bartered Bride. In 1874 a Prague clerk certified that he had a wife, one child and no property; in 1893 he finished a symphony in New York and spent the summer in a Czech village in Iowa.