The Minimalist

For fans of Tár and The Piano Teacher, this gruesome and unsettling psychological drama is a darkly lucid portrait of a classical composer's descent into madness.

"I could write that the heady and harrowing The Minimalist is a gothic meditation on the personal and intrapersonal wages and politics of artistic obsession and ambition, equal parts hallucinatory fever dream, bildungsroman, and social critique. I could also write that Kailee Pedersen and her mesmerizing The Minimalist doesn't f*ck around." -- Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts 

As the last and greatest student of famed minimalist composer Ryder Wakefield, Mia Voss has long been assured a rise to prominence in the insular world of classical music. When Ryder dies unexpectedly, she inherits everything-including the unfinished manuscript of his final composition, the mysterious Death Fugue: Music for Orchestra.

Haunted by memories of her tragic romance with Ryder's late son, Oliver--like Mia, an Asian American adoptee--Mia leaves her girlfriend behind and returns to Ryder's home to finish his last work. While there to untangle her complex relationship with Ryder, who hid his Jewish and gay identities to become one of the most important twentieth-century American composers, Mia must also contend with her lingering guilt over Oliver's suicide and her own musical ambition as the manuscript begins to exert a disturbing, mesmerizing hold over her.

Drawn from the author's own experiences as an adoptee and classical musician, The Minimalist is a harrowing examination of loss, torment, mental illness, self-harm, and artistic disintegration. 

Kailee Pedersen writes haunted, unsettling speculative fiction. She graduated with a BA in classics from Columbia University, specializing in ancient Greek. Kailee was adopted from Nanning, China and grew up in Nebraska, where her family owns a farm. She is the author of the queer poetry chapbook Pastorale and the novel Sacrificial Animals, which was named one of the New York Public Library's Best Books of 2024 and a finalist for Best Horror at the 2025 Libby Book Awards. When not scribbling down her next book, you can catch her studying opera performance at the Mozarteum University, playing video games, or working as a software engineer in New York City. The Minimalist is her second novel.