While the Music Lasts

About the Book

While the Music Lasts is the contemporary story of Isabel, a sensitive young woman and gifted pianist, born to privilege on Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side. As a girl she spends her summers with her grandparents who live in a large, idyllic nineteenth-century house in upstate New York. There the expansive lawns and exquisite flower beds sweep down to the Susquehanna River, a river which serves as an early source of fascination for Isabel, and later as a source of fear.

Isabel’s sheltered existence is shattered by an attempted rape and an unexpected death. We watch her struggle to recover from clinical depression and begin a promising college career.

When a kindly man falls in love with her, Isabel settles into what she believes will be a pleasant, conventional marriage. Looking forward to being a wife and mother, she has no way of knowing that her most difficult days still lie ahead of her.

This transatlantic novel takes Isabel to Spain and the brutality of a bullfight, to the beautiful beaches of Florida’s Gulf Coast and to London’s literary and historical sights. A memorable stay at Pembroke College, Oxford, including dinner at the high table precedes a grim discovery.

The Italian city of Venice, a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, classical music and the poetry of T.S. Eliot recur as themes throughout the book.

As Isabel strives to find her authentic self, she faces issues of life and death, cruelty and friendship, faith and philosophy and of love and passion. As her story approaches its bitter-sweet denouement, Isabel comes to understand that the last can be either dangerously destructive or ultimately redeeming.

About the Author

Susan K. Frost received a degree in English literature from the College of William and Mary where she won first prize for poetry in the literary journal. She did graduate work at Yale and Columbia Universities. Ms. Frost lived for many years in Pennsylvania where her husband was on the faculty of Swarthmore College. Their son is a lawyer in Washington, D.C. Ms. Frost has published articles in the Maryland Magazine and The Swarthmorean. She traveled extensively in Europe and Asia and has lived in England and Hawaii. She and her husband now divide their time between New Hampshire and Florida.