Ben Shattuck

"A stunning collection of interconnected stories, set mostly in New England, exploring how the past is often misunderstood and how history, family, heartache, and desire can echo over centuries. In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven between characters and families. The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, basement bar only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the first World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck's inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from colonial Nantucket to the woods of New Hampshire--into a landscape both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries. Written with breathtaking humanity and humor, The History of Sound is a love letter to New England, a radiant conversation between past and present, and a moving meditation on the abiding search for home"--