About this ebook
Sixty years later, her granddaughter, Elena Ashford, a disillusioned American cellist running from her own failures, arrives in Vienna on the trail of that lost symphony. What she finds buried beneath layers of silence and family secrets will force her to confront the truth about who the Steins really were, what art demands of those who serve it, and whether beauty can ever truly be rescued from destruction.
Symphony of Ashes is a sweeping, multigenerational literary novel that moves between the bombed concert halls of 1945 Vienna, the immigrant neighborhoods of 1970s Chicago, and the glittering yet haunted cultural landscape of present-day Europe. With luminous prose and devastating precision, Eddie Seabold weaves a story about the cost of artistic obsession, the inheritance of trauma, and the impossible, necessary act of beginning again.
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About the author
Eddie Seabold is the author of Symphony of Ashes, his debut novel. A writer, musician, and student of history, Seabold has spent more than a decade researching the intersection of music, memory, and trauma in twentieth-century Europe. His work explores the ways in which art survives destruction, the inheritance of silence across generations, and the stubborn, persistent human need to make beauty in the face of everything that would destroy it.
Seabold studied literature and music at the University of Vienna and later pursued graduate work in creative writing in the United States. He has worked as a translator, a concert programmer, and an archivist, experiences that have informed his writing and his deep engagement with the European musical tradition.
Symphony of Ashes was inspired by the true stories of musicians who lived through the bombing of Vienna, of archives that have preserved the fragmentary remains of lost compositions, and of the families who have carried the weight of artistic inheritance across generations. While the characters and events in the novel are entirely fictional, the emotional truth of the story — the truth of what it means to love the music, to lose it, and to find it again — is drawn from the real experiences of real people who lived through the fire and emerged, scarred but singing, on the other side.
