Is fame bad for your love life and can love really be bad for your health? What if art is the only thing that makes sense in your life, but you are creatively impotent? Confronted with these questions are Millie, a Serbian immigrant living in London who thinks she can cheat pain and ignore her buried grief if she works hard enough; Matthew, a middle-aged academic obsessed with death who's trying to escape his depression by starting an affair; Tom, a reluctant rock star looking for love; and Sarah, Matthew's no-nonsense wife who believes that some holes in the soul are just destined to stay empty. 'State of Longing' is a character-driven story about the search for meaning and fulfilment and about the desires that redefine our ideas of who we are, whether the objects of those desires are love, creativity or death. It is also a story about music, which shadows the characters and inspires their decisions, seeping into rhythms of the novel, its mirroring themes and oneiric refrains.