This wonderful book is a love-letter to cellos and cellists, a gripping quest across Europe for lost and sometimes miraculously re-found instruments, a startling plunge into the dark histories of our times, a meditation and improvisation on music and musicians, and a moving personal story of a cellist who has rediscovered her own gift for playing and with it the central meaning of her life.

Hermione Lee

Kate Kennedy's quest across seas and continents, following the lives of four great cellists, is a rare musical adventure. Brimming with life, comic, thoughtful, and at times heartbreaking, Cello explores the bond between players and their instruments and its enduring power.

Jenny Uglow

Kate Kennedy has followed her cello heart, and it has led her on a fascinating and unusual path. An excellently researched, thoroughly absorbing account of a personal voyage of musical discovery.

Steven Isserlis

This is a beautiful, richly fascinating book – a love song to the cello which, as if a character, lives within the lives of those musicians who play it.

Stephen Hough

A wonderfully evocative journey of exploration and contemplation in the company of four remarkable cellists and their equally remarkable instruments.

Robin Lustig

Kate Kennedy's fascinating and deeply moving book about the cello weaves a lifetime's passion for the instrument as a performer with her skills as a historian. This absorbing exploration of remarkable instruments and their players through death camps, shipwrecks, and on into the cellos of the future is an embodiment of the deep companionship between musician and instrument. I was fascinated by insights which only a professional cellist could know and by entirely unexpected aspects of the instrument's physicality. Above all, Kennedy's book is a deeply humane tribute to the partnership between composer, musician and instrument, 'the soul of music' and is a huge achievement.

Gwyneth Lewis