Saved from certain death at Auschwitz – by playing the cello

Bees and mammoth bones, a shipwreck, horse urine (preferably female), a 17th-century craftsman and a 20th-century genocide. Playing an extended narrative game of Only Connect in her latest book, the musicologist Kate Kennedy takes a bird’s-eye view of four lives and five centuries as she turns her own instrument, the cello, into a prism. Part history, biography and auto-biography, with digressions into anthropology, acoustics and aesthetics and an intriguing cast of characters, Cello sings richly. But you have to be willing to go on the journey.

Has publishing reached peak personality-stakes? Whether the subject is swimming or stamp-collecting, non-fiction seems wearyingly determined to rebrand itself as memoir, our author, also our hero, overcoming adversity and scaling new heights of self-knowledge. Here we meet the teenage Kennedy clutching a prized scholarship to Wells Cathedral School, her ambitions for a career as a cellist cut cruelly short by tendonitis. Hospitalised in her ensuing despair, she decides to live, ‘even if that meant a future without my cello’.