School of Velocity

“Audacious, reflecting in a subtle but also entirely serious way about who “’he other’ is… Rubin seems to channel young T. S. Eliot’s style and sensibility, with a fatalistic concern for the unachieved and the myriad ways in which life’s minor tragedies color the whole of experience… Rubin is remarkably accomplished for a first-time novelist… elegant, tragic, and strange.” — Los Angeles Review of Books

“Elegant and lyrical prose that both hides and reveals the unquiet mind of its protagonist, a highly thoughtful and emotionally devastating first novel” —Jury of the 2017 Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature

“This debut shows [Eric Beck Rubin is] a talent to watch.” —The Globe and Mail

“Rubin writes with grace and exactitude, giving a tangible, animated quality to the sensual world of his story. . . . Both tender and truthful in its evoking of the canyon that lies between the openness of youth and the dangerous restraint of middle age, this is a luminous, quiet storm of a novel that resounds long after its heartbreaking coda.” —Diana Evans, The Guardian (UK)

“A hugely impressive first novel about music, friendship and obsession. Gripping and emotional.” —David Nicholls, bestselling author of One Day

“Named after a series of repetitive exercises for practising scales, the narrative is as precise and methodical as its title. School of Velocity is a taut novel that builds tension to thriller level.” —The Guardian (UK)

“Eric Beck Rubin demands your focus, and when he’s finished with you, you will feel exhausted. And you will feel it intensely, in a very good way.” — Vox Libris

“Debut novel School of Velocity is classical music’s Brokeback Mountain. . . . Engrossing. . . . School of Velocity raises questions about repression, sexuality and the artistic process, and is a compelling story.” —CBC Music

“Cultural historian Eric Beck Rubin’s debut novel is an elegant synaesthetic tale in which memories of past loves and lost innocence are narrated alongside soundscapes of de Vries’s musical repertoire. . . . De Vries’s final confrontation with Dirk is a tragic, Gatsby-like meditation on the impossibility of reliving the past, however much we cling to our memories.” —Financial Times (UK)

“As Jan watches Dirk hog the limelight, longing to have him alone, there are overtones of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. Like the flamboyant Dickie Greenleaf, Dirk is a vibrant presence, always teetering on the edge. . . . Rubin has succeeded in his short novel, as Jan himself puts it, ‘to conceive of a piece as a story, and of composers as storytellers with specific voices, cadences, personalities.'” —Irish Times
 
“A fascinating dissection of the power of friendship.” —Irish Examiner