Frozen Music: A Novel [Hardcover]

Marika Cobbold (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 1999

My name is Esther Fisher and I'm just about to walk out on the only man I've ever loved. I'm thirty-four and a latecomer to love, which makes this all the harder.

Linus and Esther haven't met, but they have known of each other all their lives. Their mothers are best friends who have maintained a lifelong, long-distance correspondence. Linus and Esther are strangers who know each other's names--until fate intervenes.

Born and raised in Sweden, Linus was a dreamy child. Now he is a talented, award-winning architect who's landed the job of a lifetime. He will oversee the construction of a grand opera house in England that he's designed. For Linus, perfect architecture is frozen music, and this project will be the culmination of his dreams. He arrives in England--and comes face-to-face with a reporter who is absolutely opposed to the opera house. Her name is Esther Fisher.

Esther--whom Linus had heard his mother describe as an "inquisitive and serious child"--is now a respected British journalist, using her pen to champion the defenseless. This includes an elderly couple about to lose their home to accommodate the new opera house that Linus has designed.

Their professional antagonism sparks a passion neither can resist, yet a terrible secret remains between them, one that their mothers, in all their years of friendship, never revealed.

Haunting, heartbreaking, and laugh-out-loud funny, Frozen Music creates an absorbing world filled with memorable, lovable, unforgettable characters.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Star-crossed lovers Esther Fisher and Linus Stendal have never met, but they've known about each other since they were children. In this quirky, appealing romance by Swedish native Cobbold (Guppies for Tea), the two grow up in England and Sweden, respectively, hearing about each other via letters passed back and forth between Esther's mother and Linus's stepmother, who are old school friends. Linus, a dreamy child, chooses to be an architect, marries the wrong woman, has a son and is divorced; brainy, intense Esther becomes a socially conscious journalist and is convinced she'll never fall in love. Their lives are so different it seems impossible that they could ever meet, until Linus is awarded the assignment of his dreams, a commission to design an opera house in England. But the land chosen for the building is already occupied by an elderly sister and brother, and Esther, as investigative reporter, leads the tumultuous public battle against the project, just as she and Linus embark on a tentative, continuously thwarted private romance. A trip to Sweden and a host of subplots involving poisoning and attempted murder, wacky mothers, secret letters discovered and not-so-secret adulterous affairs exposed all add spice to an uncommonly rocky but compelling love story. Cobbold grants her tormented protagonists very few moments of bliss, but she leavens her tale with a healthy dose of ironic humor. This unusual romance makes the convincing argument that sometimes it is necessary to abandon the conventional rules of love to make room for the heart's unwieldy, essential demands. Agent, Jo Frank.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Swedish author Cobbold (The Purveyor of Enchantment, 1998, etc.) offers another winning discourse on relationships, once again distinguished by her piercing humor and incisive perspective on the usually skewed path of human interaction. The opening pages flip-flop between two children, a terminally sullen London girl and a dreamy Swedish boy connected only by the correspondence of their mothers. Perpetually astonished by the idiocy of adults, Esther dreams of looking into the minds of others, while Linus draws a more perfect world. He grows up to be a scatter-brained genius haunted by a desolate childhood; she remains the same cynical charmer, fangs in the bosom of her strange family. When the two meet some two hundred pages into their own story, Esther is a journalist fighting to save pensioners from the wheels of progress, Linus the architect whose opera house is to replace the old couples cottage. Despite these inauspicious circumstances, the two are primed for love: Linus is sad and alone after the break-up of his marriage, Esther convinced that romance is a pretty shady concept. Though things go well in their first encounter, the situation deteriorates as the pairs individual codes of ethics do battle. But when Esther is sent to Linus's summer house to nurse her vacationing mother's broken hip, she falls madly (and we do mean madly) in love with him. Too bad her paper's publicity has ruined his dream of the opera house. Too bad that the perfect Pernilla is always hanging about. Too bad that someone in the family is trying to poison Linus's father. Esther, the novice in love, enacts a variety of amusing schemes to win her mans heart, including ye olde message in a bottle, but not until they both return to England does the triad of all true romancemalice, passion, lovebegin to bloom. A large cast and bizarre subplots (Linuss oddball family, Esthers breakdown in a London caf) make for an engaging read, that, with any luck, should broaden Cobbolds audience. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; 1st edition (October 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060194499
• ISBN-13: 978-0060194499
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,855,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Parallel Lives, August 29, 2000

By 

Crystal Eitle (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frozen Music: A Novel (Hardcover)

I loved this book, even though when I had finished reading it I realized it was kind of a glorified romance novel. I was stunned to read on Amazon.com that even though she wrote the novel in English, the author's native language is Swedish. I never would have guessed. I feel fortunate that she did decide to write it in English; had she written it in Swedish, who knows if it would ever have gotten translated and published here.

The story follows two characters, Esther Fisher and Linus Stendal, in parallel, from their childhoods until they finally meet in their thirties. Esther is a headstrong child who grows into a headstrong adult, until she is bewildered by a chain of catastrophic events and has a mental breakdown. Linus is a dreamy child who grows into a brilliant architect. I found myself caring about Esther more than I have cared about a literary character in a long time. I think this is due to a certain realism in the novel; Cobbold has a way with dialogue, and with portraying the way people think and what their motivations are in a very convincing way. She also sets the stage clearly; we spend a good deal of time in the beginning of the novel getting to know who the two main characters are as children, which lends a foundation to their actions later in life. Also, I was able to clearly picture the characters and the settings--the author's love for Sweden shines through and makes the island where major parts of the story unfold seem like a magical place.

I disagree with the readers who said the ending of this book was rushed or not well crafted. On the contrary, this book kept me in suspense until the very end, which in my view is one mark of a good storyteller.

This book shines for its humor and sympathy. I was so engaged in it, and cared about the characters so much, that by the end of it I was crying. It's not a "great" book, or a classic, but it is definitely a worthwhile read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost Perfect, May 3, 2000

By 

Mary Ellen Logan (Halfax, Nova Scotia Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frozen Music: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is my first book by Cobbold. I love her writing style and her characters - I miss them now that I'm finished the book. The story would have been perfect if the author had spent as much time on the ending as she did in the earlier development. Still a terrifc read.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good up until the end, December 14, 1999

By 

"dulcinea68" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frozen Music: A Novel (Hardcover)

Really compelling book about two people who hear about each other but don't meet until adulthood, then, of course, fall in love. However, the ending is rushed and unrealistically melodramatic.