Best-selling author Joyce first boomed big with the Man Booker long-listed The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which was swiftly followed by the LibraryReads pick The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy. Set in 1988, her new title features record store owner Frank, who can find exactly the record each customer needs among vinyl-only merchandise ranging from classical to punk. Quiet and questing, Ilse Brauchmann is a different sort of customer altogether; she wants Frank to tell her about music itself.

In 1988, shop owner Frank is a kind of vinyl-only music whisperer. People come into his store and tell him their troubles. He listens and sends them into one of his homemade listening booths to hear just the right track (jazz, rock, classical) that cures what ails them. Frank and his fellow business owners, a close-knit, ragtag group hanging on in their cul-de-sac to a vanishing way of life, are being pressured by developers to sell and get out. Then Ilsa Brauchmann literally falls into their lives when she passes out in front of the music shop. These gentle, damaged people find common ground in the weekly lessons about music Frank gives to Ilsa, and there's instant attraction, as his boundless knowledge of music both charms and terrifies her. Misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and a catastrophic accident threaten the fragile bonds that begin to draw them together. VERDICT Joyce, a British actress and playwright, whose first novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, was longlisted for the Man Booker, continues to enchant and break hearts with her lovable misfits trying to survive in a modern world determined to pass them by. Irresistible. [See Prepub Alert, 7/3/17.]—Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI