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SCHOOL OF VELOCITY

Eric Beck Rubin

A wrenching and deceptively spare debut novel about an electric friendship between two boys that slowly reveals itself as a deep and lifelong love.

Jan de Vries is a virtuoso pianist who would be in the prime of his career but for the crippling auditory hallucinations that have plundered his performances and his mind. As the disorder reaches its devastating peak the walls Jan has built around him crumble, rendering him unable to repress the overwhelming flood of memories and the troves of unspoken words that linger between him and his childhood best friend, Dirk Noosen, with whom he lost touch long ago. He is faced with only one recourse: to head home and confront him. With a singular voice and a masterful balance of emotional resonance and restraint, Eric Beck Rubin tells the tender story of Jan's obsessive friendship with the charismatic, irreverent raconteur Dirk as the reader breathlessly awaits their reunion.

This luminous novel is about music, repression and regret; about adolescence, sex and friendship, and, ultimately, about the kind of love that lasts a lifetime.

Eric Beck Rubin is a cultural historian who writes on architecture, literature and psychology. School of Velocity is his first foray into fiction. He is currently at work on a second: a family saga spanning several generations, from pre-World War II Germany to present-day Los Angeles and Western Canada.
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Published 2016-08-01 by Doubleday Canada

Comments

A hugely impressive first novel about music, friendship and obsession. Gripping and emotional. —David Nicholls, bestselling author of One Day

Named after a series of repetitive exercises for practising scales, the narrative is as precise and methodical as its title. School of Velocity is a taut novel that builds tension to thriller level. (...) a luminous, quiet storm of a novel that resounds long after its heartbreaking coda.

As Jan watches Dirk hog the limelight, longing to have him alone, there are overtones of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley. Like the flamboyant Dickie Greenleaf, Dirk is a vibrant presence, always teetering on the edge. . . . Rubin has succeeded in his short novel, as Jan himself puts it, 'to conceive of a piece as a story, and of composers as storytellers with specific voices, cadences, personalities'.

A CBC Books Best Canadian Debut Novel 2016 A Guardian (UK) Best Book 2016 An Observer (UK) Best Book 2016 An Amazon (UK) 2016 Rising Star (Best Debuts)

UK: ONE/Pushkin Press