TheSunday TimesTop Ten Bestseller Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award Winner of the South Bank Sky Arts Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize

What is the difference between friendship and love?

Gustav grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem a distant echo. But Gustavs father has mysteriously died, and his adored mother Emilie is strangely cold and indifferent to him. Gustavs life is a lonely one until he meets Anton. An intense lifelong friendship develops but Anton fails to understand how deeply and irrevocably his life and Gustavs are entwined until it is almost too late...

This is a perfect novelObserver

'The Gustav Sonatais beautifully rendered, and magnificent in its scope. It glows with mastery' Ian McEwan

Rose Tremains bestselling novels have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music&Silence) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Sacred Country);Restorationwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and was appointed Chancellor of the University of East Anglia in 2013. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.

www.rosetremain.co.uk