Book Review: The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce

In her latest novel, Rachel Joyce’s writing is pitch perfect and every bit as healing as the tracks that Frank selects as prescribed listening for his customers in The Music Shop.

1988. Frank owns a music shop. It is jam-packed with records of every speed, size and genre. Classical, jazz, punk – as long as it’s vinyl he sells it. Day after day Frank finds his customers the music they need.

Then into his life walks Ilse Brauchmann.

Ilse asks Frank to teach her about music. His instinct is to turn and run. And yet he is drawn to this strangely still, mysterious woman with her pea-green coat and her eyes as black as vinyl. But Ilse is not what she seems. And Frank has old wounds that threaten to re-open and a past he will never leave behind …

If you’ve ever played sad songs to make yourself feel better when you’re blue, if you’ve ever heard a song on the radio that makes you realise you’re not alone in how you feel, if a piece of music brings back memories of a person, a place or a time in your life or you’ve ever made up a mix tape for yourself or someone you cared for, if you can’t help starting to sway, dance or even sing along when the first chords of a track start, then you need to read The Music Shop.

Rachel Joyce creates a real community around Frank and his titular music shop, with his customers and assistant Kit, the other shopkeepers in the parade and residents of Unity Street. She shows how it comes together but also how it’s under pressure to change: record reps want Frank to start selling CDs like the Woolworths in the High Street and unscrupulous property developers are circling.

Rachel Joyce’s writing may seem gentle, deceptively so, but there’s real drama here too; her true range reflected in the music Frank chooses, and how she orchestrates the cast of characters. (I couldn’t help but assign each one their own musical instrument as I was reading.) Rachel Joyce’s words heal every bit as much as Frank’s musical prescriptions. The Music Shop is an incredibly moving novel about the power and importance of music in our lives, helping us to connect with our feelings and soothing our various ills and woes. It’s also a rather beautiful love story in which music brings two damaged people closer together.

You’ll want to listen to this book’s soundtrack while you read it, and you’ll wish that Frank, his racks of vinyl, listening booths and customers, everything which makes up The Music Shop were as real now as you once wished the fancy dress shop in Mr Benn was when you were a child. Brava, Rachel Joyce, you’ve scored something truly beautiful and life-affirming in The Music Shop.

The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce is out today and is published by Doubleday, a Transworld imprint. It is available as an audiobook, ebook and in hardback. You can find it at Amazon UK, Audible UK, Foyles, Hive (supporting your local independent bookshop), Waterstones and Wordery. For updates on Rachel Joyce, her books and events, visit her publisher’s Author Page. 

My thanks to Alison Barrow at Transworld and Lovereading for providing me with a copy for review. (A shorter version of this review was originally posted on the Lovereading UK site.)