''Stephen Hough''s memoir had me gripped from the beginning [ -] riveting and revelatory. Most memoirs give me far more than I want to know - this is the rare sort that left me urgently demanding a second volume, a third, a fourth. I loved it.- Philip Pullman
Stephen Hough is indisputably one of the world''s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards.
This memoir recounts his unconventional coming-of-age story, from his beginnings in an unmusical home in Cheshireto the main stage of Carnegie Hall in New York aged 21. We read of his early love-affair with the piano which curdled, after a teenage nervous breakdown, into failure at school and six-hours a day watching television, engulfed in dreams, seesawing between sexual and religious obsessions.We meet his supportive, if eccentric parents - his artistically frustrated father, his housework-hating mother. We read of the teachers who encouraged and inspired, and others who hit him on the head sc
