Another audiobook roulette pick, Ghost Music is an odd, melancholic, beautifully written little book. I haven’t read Braised Pork yet, An Yu’s first book, but I certainly will try to soon, though I think I’ll try to find a print copy as I think Ghost Music would have been further elevated if I’d been able to linger over some of the lovelier sentences.

It gets off to an intriguing start, Song Yan wakes up in a room with no doors to find a glowing orange mushroom talking to her. Once she manages to wake up, she’s back confronted with the mundanity of her everyday life. Her mother-in-law has just moved in with Song Yan and her husband, which obviously requires some adjustment, Song Yan is increasingly bored with her job as a piano teacher, and her husband is steadfastly ignoring her desires for a child. But the routine cycle is broken when boxes of mushrooms not addressed to them keep showing up at the apartment. 

I think I wanted the book to lean more heavily into the weirdness of the talking mushrooms and possibly ghostly dead pianist. We get flashes of the surreal, the otherworldly, and then they’re taken away and we’re abruptly forced back into the quotidian. Which is probably the point. Song Yan is unable to escape the trials of her regular life, despite feeling big feelings like loss of direction in her career and a yearning for a child that her husband doesn’t want.

One to mull over, and one I’d possibly recommend in print over audio.