Trumpet

First US edition. 8vo. 278pp. Quarter-bound black cloth, lettered in silver to spine. Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde.

Signed by Kay to title-page.

Author's first novel. Winner of the 1998 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 2000 Authors' Club First Novel Award. Shortlisted for the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

"No doubt they will call me a lesbian. They will find words to fit onto me. Words that don't fit me. Words that don't fit Joss." The fictional account of one Joss Moody, a transgender Black Scottish trumpet player, who is revealed on his deathbed to be a woman, inspired by the real-life story of U.S. musician Billy Tipton (neé Dorothy Tipton). Employing multiple first-person perspectives – the bereaved widow, adopted son, mother, registrar, doctor, funeral director, old friends, band members, and a tabloid journalist – all conflicting and interacting like jazz instruments riffing on a melody to illuminate recurrent motifs in Kay's writing, such as being adopted, of mixed parentage and a consequent search for cultural roots.

As the author explained in an interview with Maya Jaggi: "Trumpet's form echoes jazz. There's a solo, with improvisations by people affected by this secret; one refrain made to play different ways. Jazz is fascinating, because it's always fluid, it has the past in it – work songs, slave songs, blues. Jazz is a process of reinventing itself. And race too, is less fixed, more fluid, in jazz. There's a sense in jazz being a family."

"Recounted in clear, spare, utterly unsentimental prose... the voices in this tender, compassionate work were still singing in my head a couple of weeks after I'd finished it." –Observer

[Maya Jaggi, "Race and All that Jazz", The Guardian, 5 December, 1998, p. 10.]