Duet for One

by Martha Anne Toll

Haunted by his youthful romance with Dara, gifted and sensitive violinist Adam must confront his past to find a way forward. At the Philadelphia graveside of his mother, Adele Pearl, wife and partner in a celebrated two-piano team, his father, Victor, mourns the loss of both his wife and musical career. As Adam reflects on their relationship, he realizes his mother was absent in ways that truly mattered. Struggling with the emptiness left by a series of failed relationships with talented women, Adam grapples with his connection to Dara, an English professor burdened by her own divorce and blind to what she lost in him. Martha Anne Toll' s Duet for One weaves a poignant narrative of loss, connection, and the enduring hope that love can be found where life resides, following her acclaimed debut, Three Muses.

Genres: Fiction

232 pages, Paperback

Published May 6, 2025

About the author

My fiction is about the emotional power of music and dance, the interplay of time and memory, the meaning of discipline, and love—always love—and death. I fell in love with the viola when I began studying with Max Aronoff, a founding member of the Curtis String Quartet. Max taught me three life lessons: (1) The music is in the rests; (2) if you break things into component parts, you’ll figure out how to put together the whole; and (3) practice, practice, practice.

Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and literary and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was subsequently published by Regal House Publishing (2022). Her next novel, Duet for One, will appear in Spring 2025. Three Muses won wide praise from national outlets including the Washington Post, New York Magazine’s Vulture, NPR, and LA Parent, and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. She is a recipient of Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Virginia and the South of France, Monson Arts, and Dairy Hollow. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

A graduate of Yale, Toll holds a B.A. Degree in Music, and her classical music training informs her artistic practice. She holds a J.D. Degree from Boston University School of Law, and comes to writing professionally after a career dedicated to social justice. As the founding Executive Director of the Butler Family Fund, she developed and led programs to prevent and end homelessness, abolish the death penalty, and combat racial injustice and inequity in the U.S. criminal justice system; and established a partnership with the Oak Foundation in Geneva and London to achieve similar aims. She grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives with her climate activist husband in Washington, D.C. They are the parents of two daughters.

Book news!! My second novel, DUET FOR ONE, will be out in early 2025. Can't wait!

Reviews

[Arlette · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.18 stars ✨

Her Siri, play “I Hear a Symphony” by Cody Fry.

I was too scared and intimidated to major in Music in college, but I did manage to minor in it. Without fail, the one question that came up in every course was: What is music? Yes, there’s the literal definition, but what does that actually encompass?

This book defines music within the context of the human experience. It’s in the way we love, the losses we endure, and the connections we cultivate. The author takes us through an intimate exploration of the emotional tides of artistic aspirations—the stark, contrasting symphonic surges of inspiration and the jarring notes of doubt. It is music that compels these characters—each one an artist in their own right—to form bonds, only to later become their unraveling. It is their pulse as much as their burden. Through this lens, the story also captures the complexities of family dynamics set against the backdrop of grief. Duet for One is a layered portrayal of a language with the power to both heal and wound the human heart.

Overall, this was an elegant story of music interwoven with messages surrounding love, loss, family, and art. I would recommend it to anyone who has ever had a dream crushed.

Thank you very much to NetGalley and Regal House Publishing for the ARC of this book. This is my honest review. All opinions are my own.

[Jennifer Oko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Music permeates the pages of this beautifully crafted novel about grief, love, and loss. With well-drawn characters and thoughtful explorations of both artistry and ambition, Duet For One is a story that resonates long after the final page. I highly recommend this book!

[Marcy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, and devastating. Grief, love, loss, family — and music. What does it all mean at the time, in retrospect, and in the end? This one will stick with me.

[Laura Scalzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sure-handed, elegant prose tells a story in a symphony of family and art, love and longing with a plot line worthy of Jane Austin. DUET FOR ONE is as sweet a tonic in these troubling times as a night at the philharmonic.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

so beautiful 🥲
“We weave the various strands of our lives as we live them.”

[Charlotte Loper · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly exquisite novel that speaks to musicians and non-musicians alike. I requested this book on a whim based on the cover, but was instantly mesmerized from the first pages. The story is a beautiful melody with various timelines and plots intersecting to form the perfect harmony. My only feedback? Encore!

Thank you to NetGalley and Regal House Publishing for the ARC.

[Adrienne Adrimano · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75/5

Love, longing, loneliness, mourning and music.

This author writes in such a romantic way, without the need for spice. Even her descriptions of platonic love and casual affairs feel romantic.

I actually enjoyed reading about characters who were outwardly perfect, and weren't bad people at all, but were still nuanced and navigated each other with difficulty within their tight family unit. It's not that common to see main characters written WELL who aren't plainly trash or fully perfect or just "quirky" with no complexity at all.

I would have given this a 4, except I wouldn't want to read it again, because some of the mother-son stuff was hard to read-- a credit to the author's ability to write sadness and forlornness. Maybe she deserves the 4, because she used the "miscommunication" trope, which is the most irritating for me, and I wasn't even mad at it.

The commentary she included about time in music and writing was clever, including using one of the main secondary characters to explore that via her career, as well as seamlessly bouncing back and forth between past and present in the text. It seems simple but so many authors today don't do it well.

Maybe it's just how people with musical backgrounds write, but this is the second book (the other being Not Another Love Song) with strings players in a romantic relationship and it's just so good reading people in love make music together.

I will read more from her.

**This review was based on an ARC.

[Lauren Kirk · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5⭐️ (rounded up)

I enjoyed every second of this novel. The way the author blended music with emotion resulted in such beautiful & lyrical writing. At times it felt like poetry. The conversation around grief- grief of losing someone in death first but also the grief of regret, grief of never getting something you needed from a parent, & grief over lost love was captured so well. While this wasn’t an intense page turner (it’s a very slow character driven plot), I found myself really taking my time to read this. I allowed myself to become immersed in the story and in the way it made me feel. Beautifully written and I loved the way love was portrayed in this as well. I would still classify this as literary fiction 1st with a sub plot of a second chance romance.

Thank you to Regal House Publishing & Netgalley for this eARC. All options are my own.

[Liebermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

You don’t have to love classical music to fall in love with Duet for One. Or know the streets of downtown Philadelphia. You just have to open the first pages of the book to be drawn into a family story of longing, absence and ultimately love. Sure, the meticulous maneuvering of the bow of the string instruments and the callouses on the fingers of the musicians teach us about the craft; and it is what we learn about ourselves (when we are ready) and the unknowing twists and turns of our lives that resonated for me as I devoured the final chapters.

[Rose Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martha Anne Toll writes a compelling story of a musical family discovering in their grief the interplay of loss and love. When the family matriarch dies, her husband and her son travel separate paths to understand the complicated legacy she has left behind. For many years, I worked for arts presenting organizations, and I particularly enjoyed Toll’s re-creation of the music world from a performer’s perspective. I also appreciated her well-wrought, lyrical prose. Brava!

[Amelia Dietrich · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a professional musician myself, I often don’t pick up fictional books about classical music as I find them too close to home. However, Martha Anne Toll defied my expectations- I loved this book and devoured it in one sitting! This beautiful story spans the entire range of human emotions. The way Toll creates these relatable, genuine characters is masterful. The story weaves and winds through time- love, loss, reflections with such seamlessness. The commentary on classical music and the life of professional musicians is spot on. Highly recommend and will be waiting for the sequel! 🙃

[Michelle Brafman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I inhaled Martha Toll’s new big-hearted and beautifully written novel Duet for One over the course of a weekend. Martha knows how to write about passion. And the viola! And family! With precision and skill, she rendered the world of classical music and the characters she created to inhabit it. I loved her literal and figurative use of time: musical time and the time it takes a family to reconstitute itself after the loss of a matriarch, to heal from a first love and relocate one’s voice. Book clubbers, you’ll have a lot to talk about with this novel.

[Derick · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a joy it was to spend some weeks with these characters.

[Julie Langenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you love classical music, YES! If you love Philadelphia YES! And certainly if you're like most of us and have suffered the break-up of a relationship or struggled with family life, YES, YES, YES! And it's a quick, easy read.

[Lottie C · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25⭐️

[a copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher from netgalley. thank you!]

a beautiful book about music, love & loss. well-written prose, realistically crafted characters & an emotional & heartfelt narrative. highly recommend, a joy to read

[Lisa WithLis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley for the arc!

The writing style was unfortunately not for me. It felt like I was being forced to have a connection/feel for characters that I had only just met and have no connection with which unfortunately had the opposite effect on me. It was also a little difficult figuring out what timeline and POV I was in throughout the book but I'm not sure if that was because it was read on a kindle or not.

Personally, I did not enjoy how the female body was written about in this book and did not feel the connection that the FMC and MMC had with each other. However, I did like reading about the music world as a former music student and brought back memories of it for me.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, subtle yet accurate depiction of love, grief and growing older

[SmallPressPicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found Duet for One to be a profound and multilayered meditation on love, loss, and grief, with a passion for music resonating throughout. With empathy and insight, the novel also explores the complicated relationships within one musically talented family.

That family is the Pearls: Adele and Victor, who for years performed as a celebrated two-piano team, and their son, Adam, a gifted violinist. At the start of the novel, both Victor and Adam are mourning the recent death of Adele, but they are grieving in distinctly different ways. For Victor, Adele’s death brings an end not only to a long and loving marriage but also to years of a musical collaboration that became deeply woven into his sense of self. As for Adam, the loss of Adele seems to compound a grief he was experiencing long before her death, a grief connected to the lack of emotional support Adele provided for him.

Yet to the novel’s great credit, Adele is not portrayed simplistically, as a largely negative presence. Instead, the novel reveals complications in her nature that make her a fascinating, and often sympathetic, character.

I was also taken by the story of Dara Kingsley, a former lover of Adam’s who remains haunted by him, just as he still has feelings for her.

One of my favorite aspects of the novel is how beautifully it captures the making of music, and the passion that Adam, Victor, Adele, Dara, and other characters have for music, as it is both played and enjoyed. That the author is a trained musician (having studied the viola, specifically) is clear from her detailed and moving writing about the challenges and rewards of playing musical compositions not just with technical acuity but with grace and deep feeling.

You can read my full review of the book here: https://smallpresspicks.com/duet-for-....

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I curled in bed and read DUET FOR ONE for most of yesterday, finishing with great reluctance toward midnight, rereading pages, not wanting to leave the world that Martha Anne Toll has created. Several times I had tears in my eyes. The heart of the book is the story of the sensitive violinist Adam, raised by two pianist parents in Philadelphia. He is so schooled in music by his mother Adele that he lies under her piano for comfort when she practices. He adores her and is angry towards her, for she never saw his real needs, only the musician he could be. At 37 years old, he is a brilliant artist and teacher though more ordinary things like romantic commitment elude him. Many years before, his mother had by flippant comments turned away the only girl he ever really loved. But Adele has now died, his father is at a loss to glue together the broken piece of his world, and Adam must face his loneliness and slowly ask himself what he wants from his life. Is it possible to go back in time and reclaim what he lost?

DUET FOR ONE is a rich story where the musical instruments, the wood and strings and bows and keys, exist as intensely as the teachers and colleagues. The music school on Rittenhouse Square became a second home to me. I never wanted to leave any of it. I know I will be reopening the pages of the book to find that world again. Highly recommended.

[Margaret Hutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

With romance, timing is everything. And so it is with music, a subject on which Martha Anne Toll rhapsodizes beautifully in her novel, Duet for One. Adam is a violinist predestined to follow his gift as it was imprinted by his parents, a world-renowned two-piano team. Years ago he had a brief but life-altering relationship with Dara, a viola player whose dream of being a musician was coming undone just as their romance was heating up. He has never understood what went wrong, and this question, along with others, resurfaces with his mother’s death. Toll hits all the right notes in this homage to the power of music and its underlying structure of time, where love endures like the best classical compositions. In the e-book edition most pieces are linked to online recordings. Listening to them, like reading Duet for One, is a sumptuous pleasure.

[Diana Rojas · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's no denying that music is center stage in this lovely novel. But what enthralled me most was the themes of grief: our reaction to the death of a loved one, of how we try, belatedly, to understand the person we lost. Toll captures so well how we don't only grieve the dead, but also our lives, choices we've made, roads not taken, conversations we never had. And how during our time of grieving, time warps and the past is present, and the present informs the past. "The past has a way of hijacking the present," she writes.

On a practical note, this was the perfect length book for a round trip train ride, a lazy weekend, the type of story that you can start and read to the end in a few melodic hours.

[Miriam Gershow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Confession: I am normally luke warm on classical music. But the classical music of Duet for One swept me up. In Toll's deft hands, music is love and loss and grief and memory and future and possibility. She writes of music as success and failure, and as the glue that binds a family and estranges. This is the story of a family grieving its complicated matriarch, but it's also a story of lost love and the possibilities that exist beyond grief. Highly recommended, whether you're a classical music aficionado or a neophyte like me.

[Paul Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her second novel, Duet for One, Martha Toll takes on the big subjects—the power and limits of love, the role of the artist as a single agent, and as a member of a duet, the role of parents to their gifted children, and the sacrifices an artist must make to truly master an art form. Can a person both deeply love her art and a child, or must she choose between the two. With understated, elegant prose, Ms. Toll draws us seamlessly into a world that is heady with the complexities of music, and as simple as basic human love. Don't miss this luminous novel.

[Ginger Pinholster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long after the final page has been turned, the beautiful chords of DUET FOR ONE continue to resonate, raising questions about love, loss, art, and second chances. Martha Anne Toll's writing is nuanced and exquisite. She brings deep musical and emotional insights to her exploration of several interrelated topics: the complexity of grieving a less-than-perfect parent, the searing regret that happens when a potential soulmate calls it quits, the urgency of creative discipline, and the power of hope. Toll's characters continue to reverberate around my brain as well as my heart.

[Norah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my full review here:
https://www.washington-unbound.com/bo...

Martha Anne Toll’s second novel, Duet for One (Regal House, 2025), is a lovely, meditative, lyrical book that drew me in immediately. I want to say that this is a quiet novel, but it's about music and musicians, so that seems like the wrong word. Especially because Toll excels at describing the classical music that permeates this story so well that I can almost hear the music swelling. But it’s a thoughtful book, a philosophical book, and a novel that made me feel calm and quiet as I read.

[Chris Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duet for One is a splendid symphony of love stories—between people, between pianos and violins and cellos and musical notes themselves. Even time has a love story here as the silent rests in music deepen its passion. I read this book twice in a row. I just wasn’t ready for it to end. Reading Martha Anne Toll is such an immersive experience and one to savor. I am truly awe-inspired by how beautifully she writes about love and music and how seamlessly she brings harmony to the page.

[Sarah L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gobbled up this book. There are so many lovely lines and truths in this novel, as well as beautiful writing about music. Reading about Adam and Dara's teenage years immersed in the joys and slights of the music world brought me vividly back to the pleasures and sorrows of my own adolescence. More than this, I appreciated the portrayal of Adele as a woman, artist, and mother. Like all the characters in this book, she is rendered with compassion and truth.