Symphony Of Secrets

By Brendan Slocumb

Richardson Reads One Book is celebrating its 20th anniversary and Brendan Slocumb’s Symphony of Secrets has been chosen as this year’s RROB selection. Slocumb’s novel, published in 2023, was praised as one of last year’s best books by The Washington Post and NPR among others.

The novel is split between two time periods: present-day and the period of 1918-1936. In the past, struggling young musician Frederick Delaney tries to make a name for himself in New York, performing with a jazz band and working at a music publisher. He meets Josephine Reed, a homeless woman who hears beautiful music surrounding her everywhere she goes. With talented Josephine as his inspiration, Delaney finds his career taking off.

In present-day New York, Bern Hendricks, an expert on the now-famous composer Delaney, has been given a dream opportunity. He’s been asked by the Delaney Foundation to help them authenticate a piece of music that appears to be from Delaney’s long-lost opera. Thrilled at the chance to work on Delaney’s masterpiece, Bern and his tech-savvy friend Eboni soon learn that Delaney’s life is a complicated one. Slocumb takes the reader on a journey with Bern and Ebony to discover the truth of Delaney’s past.

Raised in Fayetteville, NC, Slocumb is a music education graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. For the past two decades, he has been a K-12 public and private school music educator and serves as an educational consultant for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He published his first novel, The Violin Conspiracy, in 2022 and is now at work on his third, to be published in early 2025.

RROB will host Slocumb for an author lecture and book signing at First United Methodist Church Richardson on Tuesday, September 24. Digital and paper tickets will be available beginning Tuesday, September 10, at 9:00 am.

Symphony of Secrets is available at the Richardson Public Library in regular print, large print, and digitally via the library’s website. For more information about RROB and its associated special events, call 972-744-4350 or visit http://cor.net/onebook. Richardson Reads One Book is also on Facebook at http://facebook.com/RROBTX.