The Song of Names is the story of two boys brought together on the eve of World War II. Martin is the son of successful musical talent agent Mortimer Simmonds. Dovidl is a nine-year-old violinist of extraordinary promise from Warsaw who arrives at Martin's house to study with the celebrated Carl Flesch. With Dovidl's family trapped in Poland, the two boys form a symbiotic relationship, so close that they hardly know where one persona begins and the other ends. Martin sees in Dovidl a brilliance that illuminates his existence. Dovidl sees Martin as a commonsensible mediator with the plodding world—or does he?

On the eve of his long-awaited international debut, after being hyped by Mortimer Simmonds as the new Fritz Kreisler, Dovidl disappears. The family business is destroyed and Martin spends the next forty years searching for the missing part of himself, unable to come to terms with his feelings of abandonment and betrayal.

Then, at a provincial music competition, he hears a young boy play as only Dovidl could have. How did he learn that technique? The revelation sets him on the trail to an astounding act of self-discovery and renewal. Martin finally finds his lost friend, changed in ways that he could never have imagined.

Unraveling the complex strands of love, envy, and exaltation that bind artistic geniuses to their admirers, Norman Lebrecht has created a novel in the grand nineteenth-century tradition, bursting with ideas and feeling.