Timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the release of The Band’s debut album, Music from Big Pink is John Niven's first novel - a heady blend of drugs, music, sixties counter-culture and intoxicating youth
John Niven was born in Scotland around the time that Music from Big Pink was recorded. After playing guitar in 1980s indie hopefuls the Wishing Stones, he read English Literature at Glasgow University and went on to work as an A&R man in the UK music industry before leaving to write full time. He is the author of eight novels, including Kill Your Friends, The Second Coming and Straight White Male.
A moving book that succeeds not just in vividly evoking its time
and place but in distilling one young man’s clichéd and minor
destiny into something approaching tragedy … This well-written
first novel captures not just some of the dreams of that bygone
era, but the way those dreams died
*New York Times Book Review*
A book to awaken a deeper appreciation of The Band’s sweet poetry.
The book has a powerful style of its own and a story that might
illuminate an entire period … Will be admired by anyone who’s
interested in the era that made our own
*Andrew O'Hagan*
As evocative as it is gripping
*Observer*
Irresistible
*Independent*
‘More than an oblique work of criticism. It is itself, like its
subject, a grand work of art
*Ukula Magazine*
Like the album itself, Niven’s story occupies that 60s fault line
where hedonism and optimism turn to failure and melancholy …
Niven’s beautifully tragic mini-novel crawls inside the lonesome
core of this one-off album, penning a heart-broken postcard from a
past he never knew
*Mojo*
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