The hotly anticipated new novel from Laura Barnett, whose debut, THE VERSIONS OF US was the biggest debut of 2015 and was selected for both the Waterstones and Richard & Judy book clubs. Cass Wheeler - a British singer-songwriter, hugely successful since the early 70s, whose sudden disappearance from the music world three decades later has been the subject of intense speculation among her fans - is in the studio that adjoins her home, taking a journey back into her past.
Her task is to choose sixteen songs from among the hundreds she has written since her early teens, for a uniquely personal GREATEST HITS record, describing the arc of her life through song. It has been over a decade since Cass last put out an album; ten years since a tragedy catapulted her into a breakdown. In the course of this one day - both ordinary and extraordinary - each song Cass plays sets off a chain of memories, leading us deep into her past, and into the creative impulse that has underpinned her work. This is the story of a life - the highs and lows, love and separation, success and failure. Of what it is to live a fulfilled life, and how to make peace with our mistakes.
This is the second novel from Laura Barnett, who previously wrote Versions of Us, which was met with a fair amount of critical acclaim and was also an international bestseller. This novel, Greatest Hits, tell the story of a fictional British singer-songwriter, Cass Wheeler, as she spends a day assembling her “greatest hits” album – sixteen songs from a four decade career. As she picks each song, we get the lyrics in full, followed by a flashback to the events that inspired the song. The whole book ends up resembling a fictional biography, only with a scope and an intimacy that a real biography would struggle to match. What makes the novel even more fascinating is that Laura Barnett teamed up with actual singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams to record an album of all the songs in the book, meaning the book now has its own official soundtrack.
