Excerpt from The Ensemble by Aja Gabel, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Henry made this for you," Jana said, climbing into the empty bathtub next to Brit. They still wore their gowns, which were showing wear, Brit's bunched up around her thighs, Jana's wrinkly and sour with sweat. When Brit retched again, Jana reached over the rim of the tub and drew Brit's hair into a low ponytail. She held it there, and Brit liked her cool hand and the compress resting on the back of her neck, but she couldn't bring herself to say it. She just cried, and the tile edges around the toilet cut into her knees. Everything smelled like whiskey and rancid sugar.

"If only you'd put your hair up like I said ..." Jana said, and Brit cried harder. "Oh, don't cry. Don't cry. You'll feel better soon."

Through the crack Jana left in the door, Brit saw Daniel and Henry open the curtains. They had found the classical music radio station and started blasting the Elgar cello concerto. Daniel was conducting at the window, playing Barenboim's part (Brit was sure it was the Jacqueline du Pré version—she managed to whisper, "It's du Pré," to Jana), waving his hands at the black window, over the imagined city, the city of their very first failure. He was trying to show Henry something with his conducting—No, here is where the phrase begins, no, here. Her stomach roiled. She was the kind of ill where you regretted everything, where you made imaginary deals with anyone, any god, to feel differently. Du Pré was climbing the E-minor scale to the climax, sixteenth notes all the way up to sixth position on the A string, playing tenuto, slower and louder the higher she went, perhaps the most dramatic notated cadenza Brit had ever heard, and she saw Daniel conducting largamente, like a man, with authority, passion, despite his ridiculous eyeglasses, even though no one was following him. This was what he cared about, and he cared about it deeply. "No, here, here," he said to Henry. "Just wait for it."

But they knew she was in the bathroom, sick, and Daniel dialed up the knob on the radio, looked at his reflection in the dark window, conducting the absent cellist. Henry tried to correct him—his downbeat was a little wonky—but Daniel went on, already too far into his own fake concerto. He was trying to be great, at the expense of anything else.

Brit looked at Jana, droopy in the bathtub, her dark hair coming out of its bun. Jana was hard but loving and almost weepy herself, Brit noticed.

"They're ... sometimes disappointing," Jana said. "But who else?"

"Don't take a bath," Brit managed to say, croaking it, an ugly sound, and immediately after she said it—Jana laughing but noting the arch of Brit's back and anticipating her purge, changing her body just so to feel the strain of Brit's spine under her hand, and Daniel and Henry in their own separate concerts, one stone and one liquid, one earthly and one slipped through fingers, one breathless and one like breath, and du Pré hitting the highest E possible, gasping, there was no more string left, no more fingerboard—Brit leaned forward on her hands and knees and threw it all up, her primal sound like the beginning of something awful and essential, everything she had.

Excerpted from The Ensemble by Aja Gabel. Copyright © 2018 by Aja Gabel. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.