“He remembered an open-air concert at a park in Kharkov. His First Symphony had set all the neighbourhood dogs barking. The crowd laughed, the orchestra played louder, the dogs yapped all the more, the audience laughed all the more. Now, his music had set bigger dogs barking. History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.”

The fictional biography has become an increasingly popular form with novelists. In the life of a well-known person they see the possibility of finding and then writing universal truths – or, sometimes, universal lies. So it is with British writer – and Man Booker winner – Julian Barnes’s impossibly spare fiction about the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

The novella is compressed into three critical encounters that Shostakovich had with power, as he was in turn denounced by and then conscripted into the Communist apparatus of the Soviet Union, with Stalin himself playing a leading role, followed by Krushchev. Inevitably, as the composer hurtles towards compromise and tragedy, the story becomes much larger than the individual’s.

Published in 2016.