The Gustav Sonata

What is the difference between friendship and love? Gustav grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem a distant echo. But Gustav's father has mysteriously died, and his adored mother Emilie is strangely cold and indifferent to him. Gustav's life is a lonely one until he meets Anton.

Gustav Perle grows up lonely and watchful in post-war Switzerland, aching for a closeness his own mother cannot give him.

In a small Swiss town still marked by the moral compromises of the Second World War, Gustav finds the companionship he longs for in Anton Zwiebel, a brilliant, fragile boy whose music expresses what neither of them can say aloud. Their bond, forged in childhood in the late 1940s, deepens into an intense attachment that neither fully understands.

The Gustav Sonata follows Gustav and Anton through love, disappointment, and the slow realisation of what they have lost as a result of fear and restraint. Set between the 1940s and early 2000s, The Gustav Sonata is a twentieth-century historical novel that asks what it means to love someone you cannot fully claim, and whether tenderness can survive decades of silence.

‘A perfect novel about life's imperfection. Tremain is writing at the height of her inimitable powers’ Kate Kellaway, Observer

‘Tremain has the painterly genius of an Old Master, and she uses it to stunning effect. Glorious’ The Times

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