The Big Music, By Kirsty Gunn - Paperbacks of the Year review

How such a superb novel missed out on the major fiction prizes of 2012 is a mystery: perhaps Gunn’s Modernist relaying of the importance of music and of legacy – themes distilled in this beautifully aching story of grandfather John Sutherland marching across a Highland landscape with his newborn baby granddaughter, apparently heedless of the worries of her parents – was simply too challenging a read, too complex a symphony, for judges to grapple with. The best Modernists knew how to make readers care about their characters in the midst of literary experimentation, and Gunn does exactly the same, making us care about John Sutherland even as he does something seemingly impossibly evil.