Frequency by Ellen Bruhns

A songwriter loses his hearing. What remains are forty years of music inside his head and the question of which song was written for whom. In twenty-four chapters, each hung on a single piece of music, he retraces the women of his life – from a girl on a church pew in the North German village of his youth to the late encounters of a life built entirely of sound. Ellen Bruhns weaves half a century of German music history into a quiet, precise love story about memory, longing, and the small self-deceptions with which we make our past bearable. Only when the silence becomes final does the narrator understand that all his songs were written for the same woman. A melancholy, deeply musical novel about hearing, losing, and what remains when no note is left.