When Music—the ageless, androgynous being who has lived beside humanity since the first stories—dies in a London flat, the world wakes to a hush it can't name. Songs are gone, instruments are "old-world communicative devices," and only a few can still sense the absence: Marion in Putney as her memory blinks, a sharp child in Birmingham, and Tobias Tam Staghorn, thirty-two, an academic who suspects history has torn.

Tobias is meant to catalogue parlour guitars and dusty relics at Birmingham University. Instead, he follows a pattern through wood, wire, and skin: a "telephone desk" that sings when you press its levers; hand-drums that once called the spirits; Barcelona auction rooms and the canals and lecture halls of the Midlands; snug pubs along the Thames. He gathers allies—Marion and the ghost of her beloved saxman; Stevie and Daisy, who can still "see" what adults cannot; a restorer named Lily with her serene assistant Troy; and a guarded trauma doctor. The felt rule is simple and perilous: if the right tones are named and the right stories are voiced, what was erased might be called back.

As institutions close in to strip rare artefacts for spectacle and Music flickers at the edge of forgetting, Tobias must choose what he's trying to save: a field, a career, or the part of the human heart that hums. The Day Music Died is Book 1 of Tobias & Stuart (a trilogy). One on-page intimate scene, minimal violence, occasional strong language. Perfect for readers who enjoy concept-as-character mythology, academia-meets-mystery, queer slow burn, intergenerational found family, instruments with secrets, gentle speculative wonder.

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