The Gustav Sonata: A Novel
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction
A poignant tale about the enduring friendship between two men under the shadow of the Second World War.
Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem only a distant echo. An only child, he lives alone with Emilie, the mother he adores but who treats him with bitter severity. He begins an intense friendship with a Jewish boy his age, talented and mercurial Anton Zweibel, a budding concert pianist. The novel follows Gustav's family, tracing the roots of his mother's anti-Semitism and its impact on her son and his beloved friend. Moving backward to the war years and the painful repercussions of an act of conscience, and forward through the lives and careers of the two men, one who becomes a hotel owner, the other a concert pianist, The Gustav Sonata explores the passionate love of childhood friendship as it is lost, transformed, and regained over a lifetime. It is a powerful and deeply moving addition to the beloved oeuvre of one of our greatest contemporary novelists.
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
Rose Tremain. (2016). The Gustav Sonata: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Rose Tremain. 2016. The Gustav Sonata: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Rose Tremain, The Gustav Sonata: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.
MLA Citation (style guide)Rose Tremain. The Gustav Sonata: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, 2016.
| Library | Owned | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Shared Digital Collection | 0 | 0 |
OverDrive Product Record
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0044-1/{C4EEE698-9467-46F9-9F32-7D23BD6C3D2D}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0044-1/{C4EEE698-9467-46F9-9F32-7D23BD6C3D2D}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0044-1/C4E/EE6/98/{C4EEE698-9467-46F9-9F32-7D23BD6C3D2D}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0044-1/C4E/EE6/98/{C4EEE698-9467-46F9-9F32-7D23BD6C3D2D}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- formats
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780393246704
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ASIN
- value: B01BZ1V650
- name: Kindle Book
- id: ebook-kindle
- identifiers:
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780393246704
- name: OverDrive Read
- id: ebook-overdrive
- identifiers:
- mediaType
- eBook
- primaryCreator
- role: Author
- name: Rose Tremain
- title
- The Gustav Sonata
- dateAdded
- 2017-01-05T17:35:24.54-05:00
- contentDetails
- href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=2621285
- type: text/html
- account:
- name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
- id: 1151
- sortTitle
- Gustav Sonata A Novel
- crossRefId
- 2621285
- subtitle
- A Novel
- id
- c4eee698-9467-46f9-9f32-7d23bd6c3d2d
- starRating
- 3.7
OverDrive MetaData
- isPublicDomain
- False
- formats
- fileName: TheGustavSonata_9780393246704_2621285
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 2475226
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780393246704
- rights:
- type: Copying
- value: 0
- type: Printing
- value: 0
- type: Lending
- value: 0
- type: ReadAloud
- value: 0
- type: ExpirationRights
- value: 0
- name: Adobe EPUB eBook
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-epub-adobe
- onSaleDate: 9/27/2016
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=c4eee698-9467-46f9-9f32-7d23bd6c3d2d&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: TheGustavSonata_2621285
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 0
- identifiers:
- type: ASIN
- value: B01BZ1V650
- name: Kindle Book
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-kindle
- onSaleDate: 9/27/2016
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=c4eee698-9467-46f9-9f32-7d23bd6c3d2d&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- fileName: TheGustavSonata_9780393246704_2621285
- partCount: 0
- fileSize: 589404
- identifiers:
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780393246704
- name: OverDrive Read
- isReadAlong: False
- id: ebook-overdrive
- onSaleDate: 9/27/2016
- samples:
- source: From the book
- formatType: ebook-overdrive
- url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=c4eee698-9467-46f9-9f32-7d23bd6c3d2d&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
- creators
- role: Author
- fileAs: Tremain, Rose
- bioText: Rose Tremain's prize-winning books, including The Road Home, The Gustav Sonata, Merivel, and The American Lover, have been published in thirty countries. Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and member of the Royal Society of Literature, she lives in Norfolk, England with the biographer Richard Holmes.
- name: Rose Tremain
- publishDate
- 2016-09-27T00:00:00-04:00
- isOwnedByCollections
- True
- title
- The Gustav Sonata
- fullDescription
Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction
A poignant tale about the enduring friendship between two men under the shadow of the Second World War.Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem only a distant echo. An only child, he lives alone with Emilie, the mother he adores but who treats him with bitter severity. He begins an intense friendship with a Jewish boy his age, talented and mercurial Anton Zweibel, a budding concert pianist. The novel follows Gustav's family, tracing the roots of his mother's anti-Semitism and its impact on her son and his beloved friend. Moving backward to the war years and the painful repercussions of an act of conscience, and forward through the lives and careers of the two men, one who becomes a hotel owner, the other a concert pianist, The Gustav Sonata explores the passionate love of childhood friendship as it is lost, transformed, and regained over a lifetime. It is a powerful and deeply moving addition to the beloved oeuvre of one of our greatest contemporary novelists.
- reviews
- premium: False
- source: The New York Times Book Review
- content: Tremain is one of those few writers you trust completely when she goes to any unfamiliar territory, historical or emotional... Tremain knows how to show all the terrible bleak things that can happen between mothers and sons... This most unconventional book offers no easy answer, which makes it as disturbing and electric as any high-wire act.
- premium: False
- source: Wall Street Journal
- content: [Tremain's] expertise is evident in its gradual layering of personal history and its subtle mingling of lights and darks.
- premium: False
- source: Salman Rushdie
- content: The Gustav Sonata is a work of extreme and painful beauty, the story of one profound love amid many failed relationships, and of the conflict between passion and self-control. Rose Tremain is one of the very finest British novelists, and deserves, with this brilliant novel, to reach a wide new audience.
- premium: False
- source: The Telegraph
- content: [F]rom this tangled mess of human relations, Tremain draws a conclusion that is simultaneously straightforward and sweetly transformative. Like so much else in this compassionate and musical novel, it hits a perfect note.
- premium: False
- source: The Guardian
- content: This is a perfect novel about life's imperfection...What Rose Tremain understands, above all, is the tragedy of temperament and the way it plays havoc with choice... Tremain is anything but an indulgent writer and is, here, writing at the height of her inimitable powers.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
July 25, 2016
Tremain’s (The American Lover) melancholic latest centers on the lifelong friendship between Gustav Perle and Anton Zweibel. The book begins in 1947 Switzerland with Gustav and his mother, Emilie, a selfish woman whom Gustav loves in spite of her inability to nurture him. He never knew his father, only that he died in the war. When Anton arrives at Gustav’s kindergarten, and Gustav invites him home, Emilie says, “But of course he is a Jew... The Jews are the people your father died trying to save.” Anton is a talented but nervous child whose well-to-do parents encourage his desire to become a concert pianist. The boys are inseparable, sharing many sweet moments that Tremain beautifully crafts. Like a sonata, the book is divided into three parts. The second section goes back in time to the war following Gustav’s parents’ tragic marriage and the unraveling that hardened Emilie’s heart. In the last section, Gustav has become a lonely but successful middle-aged hotelier in his Swiss hometown. Anton, after years of teaching music, tries to rekindle his career as a pianist, with disastrous personal results. The great strength of Tremain’s writing is her brilliant, uncanny ability to capture the interior life of a child and to celebrate the triumphs of the many older characters populating the final, redemptive portion of the novel as they “become the people always should have been.”
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
Starred review from July 1, 2016
Like an intense, beautiful, and deeply moving piece of music, Tremain's captivating historical novel hits all the right notes.When we first meet Gustav, the protagonist of Tremain's (Merivel: A Man of His Time, 2012, etc.) exquisite novel, he is 5 years old and living with his none-too-happy widowed mother, Emilie, in their extremely modest apartment in the small Swiss town of Matzlingen. The year is 1947, and the postwar mood is grim, yet Gustav finds patches of color, flavor, and beauty in the drab, gray world he and Emilie inhabit: the dark purple of a nearly new lipstick he discovers in the gratings of the church he and his mother clean to supplement her income from working in a cheese cooperative; the taste of Emilie's knodel; the bloom of the cherry tree in their building's courtyard. Gustav's mother has offered him one chief lesson: he must "master himself," as, she says, his late father did before him. "You have to be like Switzerland," she tells him. "You have to hold yourself together and be courageous, stay separate and strong. Then, you will have the right kind of life." Into this relatively cheerless world walks Anton, a talented yet moody Jewish musical prodigy who becomes Gustav's most treasured friend. In concert with Gustav's story, Tremain, who won the 2008 Orange Prize for The Road Home, also tells that of his father, Erich, a strong, handsome assistant police chief who followed his conscience and his heart. Eventually, Gustav's lifelong friendship with Anton helps him to unlearn the stern lessons of his mother and unlock the secrets and yearnings of his own heart. Spanning the decades from 1937 to 2002, Tremain's novel is less sprawling than it is deeply intimate, a soul-stirring song about friendship, conscience, and love.COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
- premium: True
- source:
- content:
April 15, 2016
Boasting Whitbread and Orange honors and perhaps best known for her Booker short-listed "Restoration", Tremain examines the friendship between Gustav Perle, who grows up in a small Swiss town during World War II, and a gifted Jewish boy named Anton Zweibel, who's on his way to becoming a concert pianist.Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- popularity
- 471
- links
- self:
- href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/c4eee698-9467-46f9-9f32-7d23bd6c3d2d/metadata
- type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json
- self:
- id
- c4eee698-9467-46f9-9f32-7d23bd6c3d2d
- starRating
- 3.7
- images
- cover:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0044-1/{C4EEE698-9467-46F9-9F32-7D23BD6C3D2D}Img100.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- thumbnail:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0044-1/{C4EEE698-9467-46F9-9F32-7D23BD6C3D2D}Img200.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover150Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0044-1/C4E/EE6/98/{C4EEE698-9467-46F9-9F32-7D23BD6C3D2D}Img150.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover300Wide:
- href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0044-1/C4E/EE6/98/{C4EEE698-9467-46F9-9F32-7D23BD6C3D2D}Img400.jpg
- type: image/jpeg
- cover:
- isPublicPerformanceAllowed
- False
- languages
- code: en
- name: English
- subjects
- value: Fiction
- value: Literature
- publishDateText
- 09/27/2016
- otherFormatIdentifiers
- type: ISBN
- value: 9780393354843
- mediaType
- eBook
- shortDescription
Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction
A poignant tale about the enduring friendship between two men under the shadow of the Second World War.Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem only a distant echo. An only child, he lives alone with Emilie, the mother he adores but who treats him with bitter severity. He begins an intense friendship with a Jewish boy his age, talented and mercurial Anton Zweibel, a budding concert pianist. The novel follows Gustav's family, tracing the roots of his mother's anti-Semitism and its impact on her son and his beloved friend. Moving backward to the war years and the painful repercussions of an act of conscience, and forward through the lives and careers of the two men, one who becomes a hotel owner, the other a concert pianist, The Gustav Sonata explores the passionate love of childhood friendship as it is lost, transformed, and...
- sortTitle
- Gustav Sonata A Novel
- crossRefId
- 2621285
- subtitle
- A Novel
- publisher
- W. W. Norton & Company
- bisacCodes
- code: FIC019000
- description: Fiction / Literary
- code: FIC037000
- description: Fiction / Political
- code: FIC046000
- description: Fiction / Jewish
