This month, we’re reading two tales of artistic daring set in epochal moments, from Napoleonic France to Weimar-era Germany.

Music Against the Night: A Novel

Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., $29, October 2026)

This month, we’re reading two tales of artistic daring set in epochal moments, from Napoleonic France to Weimar-era Germany.

Music Against the Night: A Novel

Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pp., $29, October 2026)

You’d be forgiven for not recognizing the name John Field—even more so his wife, Adelaide Percheron, who, as the writer Yiyun Li has pointed out, appears in no more than five paragraphs in a biography of the Irish composer. Field, the inventor of the nocturne, would end up a “footnote in the life of Frédéric Chopin,” who popularized the form. But in her latest novel, Li, a prolific Chinese-born author and creative writing professor at Princeton University, reimagines the life of this “forgotten master” alongside that of Percheron, a musician in her own right.

Music Against the Night, the first installment of a new trilogy, is set at the turn of the 19th century, that era when the “whole globe was a playground for would-be conquerors.” Across decades, Li follows Field and Percheron, known as “Percherette,” as they come of age and discover their prodigious talents: Field in Dublin, and then London, where he trains under a virtuoso and piano manufacturer; and the orphaned Percherette from Pondicherry, a colonial settlement in India, to Paris and the French countryside.

Though we catch glimpses of the couple’s fate—including their estrangement and deaths—through short interludes and codas, the pair do not meet in this volume. Instead, the chapters are filled with their childhood preoccupations: their deeply felt connections with their peers, their fraught ties to their families and guardians, and, of course, their near-maniacal relationship with music, which is variously an albatross and—for both characters—equal to life itself. None of this is to say that the book feels childish. One of Li’s great gifts as a writer is her ability to render the lives of children as entire and worthy in themselves.

The novel’s private dramas are........

© Foreign Policy