A novel about music, fixation and toeing the line between devotion and possession. 

The Ghost Variations circles around a pianist and the difficulty of performance: the rehearsals, the ghosts in the room, the old loves, the rivalries, the mythologies that gather around talent until the person underneath starts to vanish. Lanigan writes with a nice clipped intelligence here — the prose has that composed, slightly cool surface, but underneath it there’s a lot of erosion. 

This is one for readers drawn to literary novels about art-making, emotional control, desire, memory and the private distortions that sit behind public brilliance. It has a chamber-piece quality: elegant, tense, intimate, and slightly airless in the right way. Good for readers of music-adjacent fiction, books about obsession, and novels where the real drama is not what happens on stage, but what has already been rotting quietly behind the curtain.

First edition, first published 2022 by Weatherglass Books. Paperback. Very good used condition with light shelf wear and minor handling to cover/corners. Pages clean, binding sound.