Peter Phillips’ first novel takes place inside the lives of London’s professional and semi-professional classical singers. 

At its centre is The Blue French, a North London restaurant run by Ahmed, where singers gather between jobs, and a forthcoming performance of Thomas Tallis’s monumental forty-part motet Spem in alium. Phillips isn't just assuming or fictionalising this world, he knows it well from the inside, being the is the founder and director of The Tallis Scholars. and the novel turns that proximity into something floating between fiction, social observation and lightly veiled anthropology. 

There's a lot of gossip. That petty dislike, professional habit, money, appetite, boredom and the logistical machinery required to produce beauty. The result is a dry, unusually specific novel about musicians as workers and music as a social world, with Ahmed and the restaurant giving the book another register beyond the rehearsal room. Published in 2023, it is Phillips’ debut novel. 

Edition / condition: The Musical Times Publications Limited, London, 2023. First edition. Paperback. Signed by Peter Phillips on the front endpaper. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers and extremities; internally clean and unmarked. Very good condition.