‘Wonderfully vivid and touching.’ Literary Review

‘Warm, wise and unflinching.’ Sunday Times

‘Witty and heartfelt.’ Financial Times

Stephen Hough is indisputably one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards.

Enough recounts his unconventional coming-of-age story, from his beginnings in an unmusical home in Cheshire to the main stage of the Carnegie Hall in New York, aged just twenty-one.

‘Hough writes like a dream, with an almost Alan Bennett-like eye and ear for the sights and sounds of childhood.’ Dan Cairns, Sunday Times

‘A memoir that is by turn audacious, harrowing, joyous, moving and funny . . . Hough [has a] brilliant ear for language, for rhythm, for silence.’ Harriet Smith, Gramophone

‘An endearingly humorous, entrancingly lyrical writer.’ Peter Conrad, Observer

‘Most memoirs give me far more than I want to know – this is the rare sort that left me urgently demanding a second volume, a third, a fourth. I loved it.’ Philip Pullman

Stephen Hough is indisputably one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards.

This memoir recounts his unconventional coming-of-age story, from his beginnings in an unmusical home in Cheshireto the main stage of Carnegie Hall in New York aged 21. We read of his early love-affair with the piano which curdled, after a teenage nervous breakdown, into failure at school and six-hours a day watching television, engulfed in dreams, seesawing between sexual and religious obsessions.We meet his supportive, if eccentric parents – his artistically frustrated father, his housework-hating mother. We read of the teachers who encouraged and inspired, and others who hit him on the head screaming, “you’ll do nothing with your life”. Then finding his way back to the piano, having abandoned plans for an alternative life as a Catholic priest, he flourished at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Juilliard School, beginning his career as an international soloist as this book ends.

‘A rich, endlessly fascinating book.’ Philip Pullman

‘One pleasure after another.’ Gramophone

‘The delightful musings of a wise and worldly polymath.’ Financial Times, Books of the Year

Stephen Hough is indisputably one of the world’s leading pianists, winning global acclaim and numerous awards for his concerts and recordings, as well as being a writer and composer.

In Rough Ideas, Hough writes about music and the life of a musician, from exploring the broader aspects of what it is to walk out onto a stage or to make a recording, to specialist tips from deep inside the practice room. He also writes vividly about people, places, literature and art, and touches on more controversial subjects, such as the possibility of the existence of God, and the challenge involved in being a gay Catholic. Rough Ideas is an illuminating and absorbing introduction into the life and mind of one of our great cultural figures.