The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes (Knopf, 224 pages, May 10)I've been a Shostakovich fan for a long time, but not entirely because of his oeuvre (I love some of his music, but not all). It was also the Shostakovich mystique that intrigued me- that aura surrounding the composer's life and the questions that dogged him even after death.
And then I heard about Julian Barnes's biographical novel based on Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich's life under Soviet terror and I knew I needed to grab a copy immediately.
