This is a beautiful, richly fascinating book – a love song to the cello which, as if a character, lives within the lives of those musicians who play it.

Stephen Hough

A wonderfully evocative journey of exploration and contemplation in the company of four remarkable cellists and their equally remarkable instruments.

Robin Lustig

Kate Kennedy’s fascinating and deeply moving book about the cello weaves a lifetime’s passion for the instrument as a performer with her skills as a historian. This absorbing exploration of remarkable instruments and their players through death camps, shipwrecks, and on into the cellos of the future is an embodiment of the deep companionship between musician and instrument. I was fascinated by insights which only a professional cellist could know and by entirely unexpected aspects of the instrument’s physicality. Above all, Kennedy’s book is a deeply humane tribute to the partnership between composer, musician and instrument, ‘the soul of music’ and is a huge achievement.

Gwyneth Lewis

Fascinating

- Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph

Strikingly original

- Kathryn Hughes, The Times

Cello sings richly … The human leads are compelling and carefully drawn out by Kennedy's new research. But their instruments are almost more so ... fascinating

- Alexandra Coghlan, The Spectator

This lively, likable, and very sad book is structured as a series of movements and interludes ... Neither silence nor sound is absolute; the passage from one to the other is what matters.

- Norma Clarke, The TLS

Rigorously sourced and meticulously researched ... It's hard to think of another book about a specific instrument that goes quite as deep as this - or, indeed any other instrument that could have inspired one.

- Richard Bratby, Gramophone

Absorbing

Wall Street Journal