How do we lose touch with the things we love? And is it possible to find our way back to them? These pressing questions drive Nadia Beard on a quest to reclaim the dreams of her childhood for her adult self.





Many, if not most of us, set aside the pursuits of youth once the reality of working life sets in, leaving the joys and skills of those days far in our slipstream. The Melody of Things depicts what coming back to those early loves entails, as Beard uproots her life to return to study the piano, years after she had stopped playing as a teenager.





Beard explores the pleasures, frustrations and revelations of re-dedicating herself to the instrument as an amateur. Her story is an invitation: to seek out the restorative power waiting to be discovered in the pieces of ourselves we have, perhaps unknowingly, lost to time.



Nadia Beard is a journalist, critic and pianist. Her writing on art, books, culture and politics appear regularly in the Financial Times, New Yorker, National Geographic, Guardian, Economist and Times Literary Supplement, among others.