David Casal · a novel · forthcoming
A young émigré pianist leaves a collapsing Moscow for New York — and the man who wants to remake him in the image of a dead girl.
The book
1991. As the Soviet Union falls and his scholarship vanishes, Daniel — a gifted, genderfluid pianist who can feel water moving underground and the dead pressing close — is offered a way out by a famous conductor. In New York he learns he is the living echo of the protégée the conductor loved and lost. It is a book about who gets to shape you, and the self you fight your way toward instead.
Literary fiction with magical-realist elements. Contains sexual coercion, illness, and AIDS-era loss.
An opening
The Red Line gives up at Yugo-Zapadnaya and spits its passengers onto the wastelands of peripheral Moscow. Daniel waits twenty minutes for the 502. The bus wheezes black exhaust past Khrushchev-era tower blocks surrendering to entropy. The other passengers won’t meet his eyes. They know where he is going, or perhaps they sense what follows him.
David Casal
I trained as a pianist in Moscow until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, then emigrated — first to New York, later to the United Kingdom, the path Daniel takes in the novel. I later retrained as a neuroscientist and worked for many years in healthcare before completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. My short fiction has appeared in The Mechanics’ Institute Review and Curator. This is my first novel.
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