A wonderful, lyrical novel with some beautiful language and imagery. Doyle pulls you into Budapest amidst snow, food and wine, music and dancing. If you're looking for a quick read and enjoy in-depth, engaging dialogue and strong depictions of scenery, this is an excellent choice. Highly recommending here and to my friends.

This is an enthralling concerto of a book. It is both intensely personal and deeply pluralist. Several themes swirl around the soloist at the centre. It has the seductive allure of a musical meme wherein the central theme hooks the listener and retains a pull amid an eddy of complementary refrains. It is crafted in a very particular style and, like the viola that is constructed within the story, it is built firmly on astute observation and convincing experience.

Music and dance feature constantly in this tale but the central melody is modern love and its struggle to remain dominant in the face of fickle friendships. There are secondary themes that swell in and out whilst also harmonising with the core narrative even when presented apparently contrapuntally; the collateral impact of modernity, the human architectures of political legacies, and the social fluidity of cosmopolitan and bohemian lifestyles.

Set mostly in the eponymous Hungarian city the novel orchestrates a strangely compelling tale of tightened heartstrings amid a curios assembly of characters. As with many orchestral works its attraction is particular and ineffable and yet somehow also appealing. Occasionally the switch in time signatures is temporarily wrong-footing, but the central melody is sufficiently endearing to draw the attentive reader in to the place where secret scores are uncovered and rewarding chords are plucked from deep within the tonal texture.

To read this novel is to engage in a literary dance. The music and movement are all. If the tune and tempo are to your taste, you may well find yourself whisked away into this intelligent, yet intuitive, romance. It’s thoughtful and heartfelt, wise and wistful, heady and grounded.

"The Budapest Artists' Club" takes place over two separate trips to Budapest, one on the brink of the new millennium, one almost twenty years later. In her first trip to Budapest, Laura loses her boyfriend but gains musical skills, and is caught up in a plot to switch out a viola under its keeper's nose. Although her time in Budapest is full of problems, Laura nonetheless falls in love with the city. She returns almost two decades later in search of some of that same magic, and maybe love.

"The Budapest Artists' Club" captures the flavor of that turn-of-the-millennium excitement, and of Central-Eastern European cities then. I've never been to Budapest but have always wanted to go; reading the book reminded me of how much I've missed traveling, and by the time I was done, I was already mapping out potential itineraries in my head.

This is not a long or difficult book, but it has a complicated structure, intercutting the two different time lines, so it requires a little bit of attention in that way. It combines aspects of "women's fiction" with the faint hit of a Cold War thriller in the viola-switching plot, and also has a number of musings on the current state of Europe. Some readers might not appreciate that, but for me they were the best part of the book, and I found myself highlighting several of them. While "The Budapest Artists' Club" is not heavy reading, it provides more food for thought than a lot of other books out there.