Book cover for The Age of Anxiety: A Novel by Pete Townshend

The Age of Anxiety

A Novel

Pete Townshend
2019 Released
272 Pages
4-5 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
Da CapoISBN 9780316398978

In his debut novel, rock legend Pete Townshend explores the anxiety of modern life and madness in a story that stretches across two generations of a London family, their lovers, collaborators, and friends.


A former rock star disappears on the Cumberland moors. When his wife finds him, she discovers he has become a hermit and a painter of apocalyptic visions.

An art dealer has drug-induced visions of demonic faces swirling in a bedstead and soon his wife disappears, nowhere to be found.

A beautiful Irish girl who has stabbed her father to death is determined to seduce her best friend's husband.

A young composer begins to experience aural hallucinations, expressions of the fear and anxiety of the people of London. He constructs a maze in his back garden.

Driven by passion and musical ambition, events spiral out of control -- good drugs and bad drugs, loves lost and found, families broken apart and reunited. Conceived jointly as an opera, The Age of Anxiety deals with mythic and operatic themes. Hallucinations and soundscapes haunt this novel in an extended meditation on manic genius and the dark art of creativity.

Pete Townshend

Pete Townshend is the legendary lead guitarist and principal songwriter for The Who, one of the most influential rock-and-roll bands of all time. He's also the author of The Age of Anxiety as well as one of Rolling Stone's ""100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time"". He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 and resides in West London, where he was raised.

More by Pete Townshend

Life House
Who I Am
Life House
A Love Letter to Europe
The Who
A Love Letter to Europe
Pete Townshend: Who I Am

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