Music Against the Night by Yiyun Li. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages. 2026.

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver. Harper, 352 pages. 2026.

The first thing every music student learns is the scale: an ordered series of notes which, in Western classical music, consists of twelve discrete pitches from which an infinitesimal array of music can be built. Yet such boundless creativity is most often stimulated by the constraints of form, whether in Bach’s Goldberg Variations in which a simple melody is stacked, mirrored, and folded back upon itself in counterpoint, or in Chopin’s twenty-one nocturnes, which take the established form of a short, lyrical piece for solo piano to its technical and emotional limits.…