<b>An introspective, original novel</b>…It is hard to write about figures of recent history in a way that feels authentic and true, but <b>Bill Evans is drawn here in all his quirkiness and mutability</b>…This novel stands as <b>a well-written lament</b>. It is <b>a clear-eyed exploration of a jazz intermission</b>, of the forced break in the chaos, and an apt tribute to a music so full of life that even a pause, a silence, can go down howling.
- Esi Edugyan, Guardian
<b>This fine if elusive novel about a jazz giant echoes his art in both its style and its story-telling</b>…A novel <b>as oblique, elusive but quietly hypnotic as its hero’s own playing</b>.
- Boyd Tonkin, Independent
<b>A sensitive depiction of an artist in mourning</b>…A <b>delicate and affecting</b> work of fiction…[Martell] <b>writes with elegant precision</b>…<i>Intermission</i> is an <b>impressive</b> English-language debut, <b>a deft and sensitive depiction of a family shadowed by loss</b>.
Financial Times
The mood music conjured up is <b>evocative, reflective and muted</b>…Martell’s <b>wonderful portrait</b>…<b>is as vivid as it is sympathetic</b>…<b>Lingers in the mind like an elusive, mournful melody</b>.
Daily Mail
Superb.
Irish Times
Captivating and hypnotic writing from a prize-winning novelist, whose prose is reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson's and Paul Harding's.
New York, June 1961. The Bill Evans Trio, featuring twenty-five year old Scott LaFaro on bass, play a series of concerts at the Village Vanguard that will go down in musical history. Shortly afterwards, LaFaro is killed in a car accident, and Evans disappears. Intermission tells the story of what happens next.
In measured, evocative prose, Intermission takes a period from the life of one of America’s great artists and fashions it into a fiction of extraordinary imaginative skill and ambition. The novel inhabits the lives of four people in orbit around a tragedy, presenting an intense and moving portrait of the burden of grief, and of a man lost to his family and to himself. It is also a conjuring of a pivotal moment in American music and culture, and a unique representation of the jazz scene in the early 1960s.
Intermission is a novel of pure control and power, certain to establish Owen Martell as one of the most promising young writers in Britain today.