Like many a younger sibling, the 1970s seldom gets the attention lavished on its predecessor decade - the glamorous, daring, revolutionary '60s. Like a somewhat reserved maiden aunt, the Isle of Wight has rarely been touched by the limelight enjoyed by its gaudier seaside cousins: Blackpool, Brighton, Clacton, even Margate for heaven's sake. And (like girls who don't kiss at parties) cellists, violinists and performers in semi-respectable bands have never had the allure of their acoustic guitar-playing counterparts in noisier rock groups. In Silent Music, Julian Wolfreys (noted academic with a passion for the three languages of words, music and the imagination) brings together a group of musicians and Annagreth, a young German 'blow-in', in the uncomfortable dreamscape of the Isle of Wight in the late 1970s. Writing with the benefit of 30 years' hindsight, Wolfreys chronicles the characters' first meetings, the shifting sands of their relationships, the words, actions and memories that unsettled and disrupted them. He tells tales of family gatherings, recording sessions, touring, birthday and Christmas parties, along with incidental events that assume significance over time, reaching a tragic climax that end both the band and its hopes. More than just a backdrop, the Isle of Wight, as it reluctantly confronts modernity, becomes both a character in itself and speaks through the human cast of the book - influencing everyone's lives and the music scene of the time. Alongside music and the tricks and gifts of memory, the Island lures the reader into the everyday and inner lives of its cast. Silent Music is a lyrical elegy to the enduring nature of love.

Julian Wolfreys is Professor of English at the University of Portsmouth and a member of an Isle of Wight band called The Nightwatchmen. His research covers the nineteenth century and English modernism, with particular interests in inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, while also being informed by continental philosophy from Kant to the present day, and with a particular philosophical interest in phenomenology. He has published on Romanticism, Victorian literature, Modernism and postmodern literature and culture, with particular interests in questions of identity and subjectivity, the politics and poetics of urban representation, the rural subject in English culture, perception in literature, and the relationship between language, music and that which cannot be expressed directly. He is currently working on four books, a study of Victorian poetry and the influence of German Romanticism, a phenomenology of loss, the relationship between subjectivity and loss in the context of Englishness, from John Clare to Virginia Woolf, and the question of place and dwelling in novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the perspective of the concept of "dwelling".