Time's Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War

A work of extraordinary power, beauty and human feeling. ― Sunday Times, History Book of the Year

Profoundly moving. -- Edmund de Waal

A most rare book: extraordinarily powerful - magisterial, meticulously rich and unexpected, deeply affecting and human. -- Philippe Sands

The outstanding music book of this and several years. ― Times Literary Supplement

A masterpiece . . . We were stunned by its profundity, its masterful structure, its beautiful shimmering sentences. -- Jury of the Baillie Gifford Prize

Eloquent and thought-provoking . . . an insightful reflection on how we remember and who we forget. -- Leah Broad ― Financial Times

A work of vast historical scholarship and acute musical insights. -- John Adams ― The New Yorker

If you ever doubted that music matters, Eichler has written the book to prove you wrong. -- Dominic Sandbrook ― Sunday Times

Jeremy Eichler, one of our finest writers on music . . . evokes not only the smouldering power of the music but also the haunted lives and places from which these masterpieces sprang. It is a work of searching scholarship, acute critical observation, philosophical heft, and deep feeling. -- Alex Ross

Time's Echo is a remarkable book. Jeremy Eichler shows how listening to history through its music can transport us in mind, body, and spirit - resulting in a profound, detailed resurrection of the past into the living present. The composers at the book's heart come across not as distant historical figures but as fully human characters with whom we can identify. The result is a kind of time travel with music as our mode of transport, a poignant journey back to an era that still affects us, and an inspiringly hopeful meditation on the power of art to remember not just the traumas of the past but also its highest ideals. -- Yo-Yo Ma

How is the past remembered or forgotten? History can often amount to little more than a tired archivist logging away dates and factoids. But as Jeremy Eichler reveals in this splendid and uncompromising book, music is mankind's imperishable monument to what memory will not and cannot suppress. -- André Aciman

Time's Echo is a book with enormous ambitions. That it achieves them, in fact overlaps them, is astonishing. -- Jane Graham ― Big Issue ‘Book of the Year’

Wonderful . . . This is a deeply learned book, but it is also a very human one. -- Ivan Hewitt ― Daily Telegraph

Because of its fluency and deeply poetic style, this historically primed masterpiece is a joy to read. I cannot recommend it highly enough. -- Gramophone ― Rob Cowan

Eichler's riveting and magisterial new book . . . is cultural history at its most profound and moving. Like the music at its heart, this book also "flows from the mysterious capacity to bridge emotion and intellect." It is a groundbreaking achievement in memorial history. -- Jury citation, National Jewish Book Awards, ‘Book of the Year’