The Music in My Head by Mark Hudson

The Music in My Head

Mark Hudson

The heady rhythm of African music drives you on to read this story about a middle aged man's memories and manias. A compelling read. Its cynical view will get under your skin and its insistent beat inside your head.

Extract
Serin Ahmadou Cham .... You can't get away from him, can you? Those huge and immemorially expressive eyes, that smirk of imperturbable knowing, follow you from his book jackets, his promo posters in Waterstones, his myriad TV appearances. Even you've seen Serin - you just don't remember it, 'cause you can't remember African names. The man who equated the civilisation of the savannahs - its ancestral cults, its age-graded initiation societies, its inscrutable cosmologies - with the mythology of pagan Greece. He is unlike other Professional Africans who fill the conferences ... he's legit. Alright he got shunted into the Anglophile groove - I think he went to Oxford or somewhere - but he is actually from HERE.
Parallels
  • High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
  • Mr Commitment by Mike Gayle
  • Money by Martin Amis