Three Muses

Three Muses is a love story that enthralls; a tale of Holocaust survival venturing through memory, trauma, and identity, while raising the curtain on the unforgiving discipline of ballet.

In post-WWII New York, John Curtin suffers lasting damage from having been forced to sing for the concentration camp kommandant who murdered his family. John trains to be a psychiatrist, struggling to wrest his life from his terror of music and his past.

Katya Symanova climbs the arduous path to Prima Ballerina of the New York State Ballet, becoming enmeshed in an abusive relationship with her choreographer, who makes Katya a star but controls her life.  

When John receives a ticket to attend a ballet featuring Katya Symanova, a spell is cast. As John and Katya follow circuitous paths to one another, fear and promise rise in equal measure. 

Three muses—Song, Discipline, and Memory—weave their way through love and loss, heartbreak and triumph to leave readers of this prize-winning debut breathless.


Three Muses is available in paperback, e-book, and audio

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Reviews of Three Muses

“Exquisite.” Washington Post

“Author Martha Anne Toll … weave[s] an intimate portrait of romance and heartbreak …[the]novel is not only notable for its poignant prose, clever foreshadowing, and deeply moving ending, it also comments on many of the harsher truths present in the ballet world, acknowledging the reality without glamorizing it.” NPR

“In rich detail, Three Muses offers a story that considers music, history, and what it means to live with hidden grief. A captivating novel of longing filled with two people’s quest to find a raft of hope in a sea of loss.” Buzzfeed News

“The wonder of this book lies not just in tracking these stories through two decades toward their inevitable convergence, but also in witnessing how skillfully Toll tends to them…. By the time you finish this, you’ll realize you’re in the hands of a maestro.” Vulture [reprinted in the UK]

“This is a remarkable debut novel enriched by the years that Toll has taken to pull together her diverse experiences: of ballet; of her family’s tragic experiences of the Holocaust, living in Mainz and living in the USA. Above all else, it is highly recommended as a first class read.” Graham Watts, OBE, Chairman, Dance Section of Critics' Circle & National Dance Wards in Critics Circle 

“An affecting chamber piece with plenty to say about art, trauma, and healing.” Kirkus starred review

Three Muses made The Millions’ Most Anticipated: The Great Second Half of 2022 list

“Three Muses is a deeply moving story about how we experience and overcome grief and trauma. Throughout the book, there is a delicateness to Toll’s writing as she navigates some of humanity’s darkest moments.” Debutiful

“An exquisitely crafted novel….While a love triangle always adds dramatic tension, what makes this story sing is the acute way Toll paints the tension that takes place on stage. Even those who are not connoisseurs of the dance form will be enraptured by Toll’s imagistic language that somehow manage to somersault and twirl in ways that make the dancers’ moves real.” L.A. Parent

“Martha Anne Toll’s beautiful and emotionally resonant first novel won the 2020 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction, and it’s clear why.” “A Fraught Fling, Deep in Meaning,” Lilith Magazine

“With healthy doses of nostalgia and authenticity—and a tear-jerker ending—Three Muses is a deeply honest story that embraces the magic of fiction while not shying away from life’s harsher realities.” POINTE Magazine

“THREE MUSES is sublimely written. Every sentence is a joy to read. Even though [the] prose is tight and
disciplined, it’s also elegant and flowy, just like ballet.” Authorlink Interview

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Advance praise

“Martha Anne Toll’s three muses are those of song, discipline, and memory. In this beautiful, dark novel, she has choreographed the mysterious ways these forces push and pull and shape the lives of her characters – lives of terrible loss and precious if dismaying survival – through their dissonances, harmonies, deprivations, and recoveries. A meditation on history, music, the catastrophic inheritances of the Holocaust, and the so common, painful hiddenness of hope itself, Three Muses captivates the reader from the first page to the last.”

- Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers and Enon

“Martha Anne Toll's Three Muses is so surprisingly soulful. The surprise doesn't lie in the existence of textured prose that explores dance, music, love, and time in wholly different ways; it lies in how that textured prose actually creates a new time signature wholly dependent on practice and discipline. This is phenomenal writing. It just is.”

- Kiese Makeba Laymon, bestselling author of Heavy, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Long Division

Three Muses is a tender, well-told story about how tragedies reverberate through the years and shape the course of two intersecting lives. This is a wonderful meditation on trauma and loss--and a love story in its own right.”

- Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State and contributing editor at The Millions

Three Muses is a hauntingly beautiful testament to the power of art and love. With exquisite craft, Toll writes about dance and music in sentences that sing. She is a writer to watch.”

- Lara Prescott, New York Times bestselling author of The Secrets We Kept, now being adapted for television

“Martha Anne Toll’s moving and accomplished debut is transporting, lyrical, and deeply provocative. With a nod to the legendary work of George Balanchine, Three Muses excavates the legacy of trauma, the cost of secrecy, and the complex entanglements of art and survival.”

- Amy Gottlieb, author of The Beautiful Possible

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