Music Against the Night: A Novel (The Nocturne Trilogy)
Yiyun Li presents *Music Against the Night*, a sweeping historical novel about two gifted musicians whose lives are shaped by ambition, art, love, loss, and the upheavals of their era. The event, held in partnership with the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, features Li in conversation with Rabih Alameddine.
Set as the eighteenth century draws to a close, the novel follows John Field, an Irish musical prodigy whose career takes him from England and France to Russia, where he becomes a celebrated pianist and composer of the dreamy pieces known as nocturnes. It also traces Adelaide “Percherette” Percheron, an orphan raised in Pondicherry by her formidable grandmother. Determined to escape a life in which marriage appears to be her only route to prosperity, Adelaide pursues her secret passion for the pianoforte and makes her way to Paris and Moscow as Napoleon’s armies advance. The two aspiring musicians, destined to become husband and wife, confront rivalries, demanding teachers, guardians, political turmoil, and the difficult choices between talent and genius, legacy and success, and passion and material security.
Li is the author of numerous fiction titles, including *The Book of Goose*, *Must I Go*, *Where Reasons End*, *The Vagrants*, and *A Thousand Years of Good Prayers*, as well as the memoirs *Things in Nature Merely Grow* and *Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life*. Her honors include the PEN/Faulkner, PEN/Malamud, PEN/Hemingway, PEN/Jean Stein, MacArthur Fellowship, and Windham–Campbell awards; she has also been a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Alameddine is the author of *The Wrong End of the Telescope*, *The Angel of History*, *An Unnecessary Woman*, *The Hakawati*, *I, the Divine*, *Koolaids*, and the story collection *The Perv*. His distinctions include the Dos Passos Prize, Lannan Prize for Fiction, PEN/Faulkner Award, and Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award.
When: Monday, October 19, 2026
Showtimes: 7:00pm
Tickets: Free admission with first-come, first-served seating.
Lineup: Yiyun Li, with Rabih Alameddine in conversation.
Venue: Politics and Prose at 5015 Connecticut Avenue NW, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008.
Partnership: Presented in partnership with the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
Accessibility: To request accommodations or ask accessibility questions, email events@politics-prose.com, ideally at least one week before the event. Requests made closer to the event will also be considered.
Run time: Not specified.
Ages: Not specified.