Critically acclaimed author Jim Crace returns with a masterful and tender new novel that explores the improvisational power of jazz and the complexities of love and violence. Leonard Lessing is a British jazz musician whose life has become largely predictable and stagnant. While watching the news one night he recognizes a man who is holding four hostages. The man is Maxie, a former acquaintance who he met eighteen years previously in Austin, Texas. When he meets up with Maxie's daughter Lucy, Lennie must decide whether to sit silently, as he has so many times, or find the courage to go to the crime scene and potentially