Some Strange Music Draws Me In
From an award-winning author, this provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town.
It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.
Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive page turner about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury’s elegant, arresting, and fearless prose dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.
Reviews & Praise
"One of the best works of literary fiction I’ve read not just this year but in the last several, and it sucks that this didn’t get the critical appreciation or commercial attention it deserved—but so begin the lives of all burgeoning cult-classics.... Hansbury, also the author of Feral City and Vanishing New York, has a gift for powerful and gentle observation and he puts it to exceptional use here. His depiction of a high school summer is note-perfect, sticky and sweet and thrillingly full of potential—but the true gem in the novel is his careful and complicated consideration of not just transition but the way that the conversation about queerness and gender identity has both radically changed and stayed tragically the same over the last several decades." -- Drew Broussard, Literary Hub, 38 Favorite Books of 2024
"without a doubt the most energizing, surprising and gorgeously articulated book of colliding and conspiring trans narratives I’ve encountered all year. The project is awash in razor-sharp and insightful gender politics and beautifully rendered relationships and emotional terrains that will stay with you long after reading." -- Chase Joynt, The Queer Review 2024
"This soulful coming-of-age story is contemplative, funny, and harrowing." --Andrés N. Ordorica, Debutiful, Favorite Books of 2024
"Characters and their interpersonal dynamics are rendered with care and insight, as are the book’s explorations of queerness.... a contemplative and deeply moving novel about gender and class." -- Autostraddle, Best Queer Books of 2024
“a nuanced examination of gender identity’s many contradictions…. Hansbury has created a character…able to extend compassion across generations. His life, then, is more than a tense and moving story–it is also a puzzle formed by the spikiness of identity.” - Grace Byron, The Nation
“This complex, rewarding, and deeply thoughtful novel posits the vitality of queer communities and the lifeline such communities provide when violence is always simmering in the background. This is a touchstone LGBTQIA+ coming of age novel containing superbly drawn characters, a brilliant story, and knowing prose that constantly seeks to complicate simplistic narratives around gender, sexuality, and class.” - Booklist, starred review, Alexander Moran
“At once an analysis of gender, sex, and, yes, class, it’s also populated with characters so real you’ll wish you could hang out with them and keep them safe.” - BUST Magazine, Rufus Hickok
"The prose in this book is absolutely impeccable and I find myself actively angry that more people are not reading it and talking about it!" -- Kim Narby, Write or Die
“Exquisitely depicts the dangers of being different, the intensity of teenage relationships and the power of representation in an irresistible novel that will stay with me for a long time.” - The i, Best New LGBTQ+ Books
“Compelling…beautifully written. I loved the alternating perspectives of the pre/post transition dual time. Wonderful.” - The Daily Mail, Sara Lawrence
“…incisive… sharp, perceptive prose. There are no easy answers in Hansbury’s bracing narrative.” - Publishers Weekly
“one of the best novels I’ve read in a while…Hansbury is a master class in the power of word choice…. This is the kind of book you’ll be eager to read twice.” - Milo Todd, Foglifter Journal
“this soulful coming-of-age story is contemplative, funny, and harrowing.” - The Skinny, 5-star review, Andrés N. Ordorica
“rich and illuminating …. The author–a trans man himself–is brilliant at depicting the shifting sands of relationships, not only friendships, but also how families rub up against each other too. And, at a time when regressive forces are pushing back against hard won rights, he, through this deeply humane, warm and funny novel, makes the case for tipping over apple-carts.” - The Crack
“a spectacular read about queer identity and finding your place in the world.” - Apple Books, selected a Favorites and Staff Pick for March 2024
“This book is so great. I just sat down & cldnt stop reading it. Smart, hard & sweet. Such a great follow up to the tremendously great Feral City. Griffin can write anything & well, way beyond.” - Eileen Myles
“From the first brilliant sentence I knew I was going to love this book, and I did. Griffin’s writing is poetic and searching and I felt like I had lived these characters’ lives even though we’re worlds apart.” - Ariel Schrag
“I loved this devastating marvel of a book.” - Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
“This funny, defiant, and passionate novel will make you want to play Patti Smith’s Horses at full volume as a soundtrack while you’re still reading. Some Strange Music Draws Me In is the coming-of-age, reckoning-with-gender story we have all needed for decades, the kind that can change and save your life.” - James Hannaham, author of Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta
“A pleasure to read.” - Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“This gorgeous, propulsive novel is filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom and the life-saving lifelines of counterculture. With writing so tense and honest and real, I recognized this place and these people deeply, and felt them all in my heart long after the book was finished.” - Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up
“Goddamn, I loved this book. It’s tough and sweet and smart about the places we come from and how we fight and flail to discover ourselves inside them. Hansbury has achingly captured the miracle of queer generations seeing and saving each other, without hiding the real struggle to connect across generations, our different times and traumas. A gorgeous novel readers will absolutely live inside of. I will be thinking about Max and Sylvia for a long time, they are now so dear to me. - CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife and Family of Origin
“Some Strange Music Draws Me In is luminous, propulsive, tender, and full of light. Hansbury’s prose is both scathing and soulful, delivered with care and grace and aplomb. This novel’s warmth is palpable, and Hansbury has crafted a truly rare thing—a gift and a guide.” - Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal, Memorial, and Lot
“Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a story of how latent queerness can point toward the exit from poverty and despair. It’s about inter-generational queer care, about how even with a clean getaway we nurse our wounded pasts. And yet still it’s a book filled with compassion for all those ground down by the violence of class.” -McKenzie Wark, author of Love and Money, Sex and Death
“An uncompromising excavation of a transmasc adolescence.” - Lauren John Joseph, author of At Certain Points We Touch
“Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a beautiful exploration of adolescence and aging. Filled with the lingering echoes of a former self, Hansbury has created a rich portrayal of moving forward in all life’s messy glory while wrangling with a painful past. Max and Mel will leave you reeling with emotion, transformed and hopeful. Like a good song, this is a novel that will play on your mind for years to come, humming brightly and freely.” - Andrés N. Ordorica, author of How We Named the Stars
Published in the UK by Daunt Books:
