PS Publishing is another British small press; they’ve been in business since 1997, with their first four books released in 1999. In 2008, they have or will have released thirty-one books. They’ve one six British Fantasy Awards, as well as one World Fantasy award and various other awards from horror organizations and guilds. They have a short fiction magazine called Postscripts in addition to all of their various novels, novellas, and story collections. Ian MacLeod was born in England in 1956 (specifically near Birmingham); his father is Scottish and his mother British. He has since published about five novels and four short story collections.

Roushana Maitland is a hundred and seven years old and dying when she finds a young man on the beach, naked and injured. It’s some time around the end of the 21st century or the beginning of the 22nd, and there’s been a lot of changes since she was a child. She’s expected to reminisce — it’s part of her treatment — and she talks to the young man, whom she calls Adam, about her life. Roushana is a musician; she’s been a concert violinist for more than eighty years by that point. Her life has been a series of world upheavals, starting when she was twelve or so, but there has been one constant over the last hundred years: music.

Normally I hate books about musicians, because I am one (well, I have a degree in music, emphasis in history and theory), and I find errors all over the place. I found three in this one: the Carmen Fantasy misattributed to Ravel (Bizet wrote it); a mention of 4/5 time signature (obviously a transposition of 5/4); and Andre Previn’s last name ‘corrected’ to Prevent. I only mention that because out of three hundred pages, I found a whopping three errors that almost no one else would notice. At this moment, I don’t know if the author is a professional musician or not; I don’t know if he’s got degrees upon degrees in music history and theory and performance, but this is the single most accurate book about being a performing musician that I have ever read. It covers the frustrations, the joys, the highs, the lows, the crazy people surrounding one, what one’s parents might say — so much.

Mr. MacLeod’s vision of the future is strangely beautiful; a lot of the changes can be viewed as Nature taking the world back over, although in a very technological fashion. People don’t have to end when they die anymore; computers don’t exist as CPUs and keyboards anymore; cars drive themselves; the insides of houses can have grass growing all over them. Most major illnesses have been cured; there are quick pills to take to sober up (that actually work) and many new kinds of drugs (including odd sorts of nanorobot-like parasites). We see the progression from our time to twenty years later, to thirty years later, to a hundred years later gradually, and although I certainly don’t want to live in his future (nuclear war isn’t exactly something anyone wants to experience), it makes so much sense.

This book reminds me a little bit of one of my favorite books: A Severed Wasp, by Madeleine L’Engle. While the L’Engle isn’t science fiction and takes place in sometime that might be the 1980s, it’s still partly a memoir of an incredibly talented woman musician who is coming to the end of her life, who was married to a brilliant but volatile conductor, and who was involved with political and war-like goings-on. France plays an important role in both novels, as well. Katherine Forrester Vigneras and her husband, Justin, were incarcerated and tortured in World War II; Roushana wasn’t, but she lived through some horrific things in her one hundred and seven years. I would say that anyone who enjoyed either of these novels will enjoy the other one, based on my reaction. One doesn’t necessarily have to be a musician or a music nerd to enjoy this book, although it might help at least to have some appreciation of music in general. 4.5/5 stars.