The Song Is You - Arthur Phillips

Put some Miles Davis or Carly Simon on the iPod and dive deep into Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You (Random House, $15), this gifted novelist’s tragic and ebullient novel about love, loss, and what was sung.  This tightly constructed but wildly imaginative story is a genuine multimedia experience.  Publishers Weekly calls it   “enthralling…brilliant… triumphant.”  This is a hyper-imaginative tale about a New York advertising executive’s midlife crisis and estrangement, who stumbles onto a gig by a bar singer, an encounter that Phillips magnificently weaves into an obsession with the singer and the song, and, best of all, dramatizes the healing power of art and music.