![Music for Wartime - Rebecca Makkai - 10/24/2015 - 3:00pm](/sites/www.wisconsinbookfestival.org/files/styles/event_image/public/media/MFW9780525426691%2520%25281%2529.jpg?itok=-cYMzn0T)
Music for Wartime
In Music for Wartime, Makkai brings together a collection of sweeping, powerful, spellbinding stories, three of which under the “legends” section are based on her own family’s history in 1930’s Hungary. A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, while her own relationship is falling apart. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young boy has a revelation about his father's past when a renowned Romanian violinist who survived a brutal pogrom only to be incarcerated for twenty years by the 'liberating' Communists plays a concert in their home. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women in a village on the brink of utter destruction. In these transporting, wide-ranging, and deeply moving stories, Rebecca Makkai brings to bear the signature mix of intelligence, imagination, and heart for which her novels are so beloved.
Rebecca Makkai
![Photo of Rebecca Makkai](/sites/www.wisconsinbookfestival.org/files/styles/medium/public/media/Rebecca%20Makkai%20-%20%C2%A9%20Brett%20Simison.jpg?itok=772kj_qb)
Rebecca Makkai’s last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and it was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.