Be prepared for a huge dose of dark and poetic surrealism.
— Riveting Reviews, The European Literature Network
The Music Teacher - Renata Serelyte.jpg

The Music Teacher

Renata Serelyte

Translated from Lithuanian by Marija Marcinkute

Shortlisted for the Lithuanian Book of the Year Award

A small town police investigator broods obsessively on her tragic love affair with her school music teacher. After the town is shaken by the murder of a teenage girl, the police investigator quickly finds that her ex-lover is her main suspect.

‘The nameless narrator and heroine, a provincial thirty-something police investigator, tries to solve the murder of a beautiful teenage girl found in the bathtub of a hotel room. The official coroner’s verdict hasn’t suggested anything suspicious, yet our investigator feels certain the victim has been killed and so continues to probe – mostly in the dark.’

Riveting Reviews


‘The Music Teacher is a crime novel with a difference.’

Deucekindred Blog


Renata Serelyte

Renata Šerelytė is a Lithuanian novelist, poet, essayist and literary critic. She was born in 1970 in the small rural town of Šimonys in north-east Lithuania. As a child she lived in various places in Lithuania and Belorussia. Šerelytė lives now in Vilnius. She is the author of a number of novels and has won a large number of awards in Lithuania for her writing, including the prestigious Jurga Ivanauskaite Award. Her novel, The Music Teacher has been turned into a film in Lithuania.