Ghost Music

Written by An Yu

Narrated by Vera Chok

For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. When she married, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her desire to have a child.

Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her long-buried family secrets. Soon strange parcels start to show up on the doorstep and Song Yan’s dreams become troubling and claustrophobic. Striking out
alone through the winter city, she finds herself pulled into the ancient hutongs to confront the source of her unease. In a still, silent room in a timeless house, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of all the pain and beauty in her life?

Evocative, magical and endlessly surprising, Ghost Music is a captivating journey through memory, expression and self-discovery towards the shimmer of new beginnings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781705087275

An Yu

An Yu is the author of Braised Pork and Ghost Music. She was born and raised in Beijing and studied in New York and Paris. A graduate of the NYU MFA in creative writing, she writes her fiction in English and lives in Hong Kong.

[Alexander Casillas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ghost Music is wonderful for readers who know a little bit about Chinese culture and regions, and even for those who are looking for a first steep into Chinese literature. An Yu is a master at focusing on the minute details of family and relationship dynamics in this novel. Our main characters maneuver life in 21st century China while trying to find meaning through different potential avenues of life. Parenthood, career mobility, and feelings about the past all influence each character on their journeys through accepting the most devastating truths about themselves and the world while always having to find ways forward. While those crucial truths can be informative, this novel explores how those truths are often swept under the rug to save ourselves from facing the complex realities of life and, too often, death. This novel understands the realities of life to be so complex as to appear to us as more fantastical than our wildest dreams.

Read this novel with a mind to explore the thin line between the real and surreal, and you will discover something inside yourself that drives your behaviors the way the characters of this novel are driven by obsessions over their own fantastical realities. The worlds of Classical music, Chinese tea culture, and rare Chinese mushrooms come to life throughout this novel in ways that are exciting to explore.

Vera Chok adds wonderful narration to the audio version by Media Recorded Books, bringing emotion and different character voices and perspectives to life with her talents.
alexandercasillas.com for more.

[Kelsey Wood · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked the main story a lot, but some of the sub plot felt very disconnected from the story. It was enjoyable however and an easy to follow along audiobook.

[Arten Lux Tornasol · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Melancholy and captivating while simultaneously remaining surreal and warm. She beautifully weaves in these seemingly disconnected subplots making them all flow like a perfect melody.

[darkloriscat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ghost Music feels less like reading a story and more like listening to the hum of an empty room. Meng Jing moves through her muted life with her husband and mother-in-law as if she were already a ghost; the mushrooms that begin arriving at their door only make that inner decay visible. Yu’s prose is translucent—every sentence clean, quiet, and loaded with emotional sediment.

What begins as a domestic mystery unfolds into an allegory about art, grief, and the hidden continuities of life. The mushrooms are brilliant symbols—growth from seeming death, communication through decay—and Bai Yu, the vanished pianist, becomes their human echo: an artist hollowed out by pressure until he exists only as resonance.

This isn’t a novel that reaches for catharsis. It asks you to slow down, to feel how silence accumulates meaning. The reward is a lingering sense of melancholy renewal: that life, like fungi, goes on feeding itself beneath the surface.

A small, precise haunting about how creation and rot share the same roots.

[tastor-60018 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reminded me a lot of a Murakami novel: the emphasis on classical music, the protagonist entering a hauntingly surreal dreamscape, asides about cooking a delicious sounding meal, etc. I enjoyed it but felt it could have gone a little further in some aspects, though I chose it as a short novel I ended up wanting a bit more.