This is the second novel from Laura Barnett, who previously wrote Versions of Us, which was met with a fair amount of critical acclaim and was also an international bestseller. This novel, Greatest Hits, tell the story of a fictional British singer-songwriter, Cass Wheeler, as she spends a day assembling her “greatest hits” album – sixteen songs from a four decade career. As she picks each song, we get the lyrics in full, followed by a flashback to the events that inspired the song. The whole book ends up resembling a fictional biography, only with a scope and an intimacy that a real biography would struggle to match. What makes the novel even more fascinating is that Laura Barnett teamed up with actual singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams to record an album of all the songs in the book, meaning the book now has its own official soundtrack.
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