You can pretty much always get me with a book about music. The way emotions and memories collide through song fascinates me. Almost every novel I have written or attempted to write has had some connection to specific songs.

I accidentally found “The Song Is You” by Arthur Phillips while trying to kill time at a bookstore before a meeting for work. I had, as usual, left too much time to travel so I walked around the store instead of creepily hanging out near the office where I needed to meet someone for 30 minutes.

Like Nick Hornby, Phillips takes a successful guy facing some critical decisions in his life and shows how music can affect his decisions. The difference is that Julian Donahue, the main character, faces his fate not so much through music he knows well, but instead through new music he discovers by accident.

The parallel growth of the relationship between Julian and singer Cait O’Brien keeps the pace of the book moving quite well. They never meet, but lean on each other through online interaction, telephone calls and secret signals.

What Phillips does so well is balance that part of the story with Julian’s failed marriage, the death of his young son and his eccentric brother, who flamed out on Jeopardy thanks to an accidentally inappropriate answer. That part became funnier to me when I found out that Phillips himself was a five-time winner on the show back in the late 1990s.

The book could have easily turned into a judgment of how Julian’s life has so many loose ends or an excuse for pushing grief into the corners of your life, but Phillips masterfully shows how we all need to exist on whatever plane makes us happy, even if that means neverletting the reality destroy the fantasy.

I was happy to discover that a movie based on the book is in the works. I can’t wait to finally hear Cait O’Dwyer’s songs.