THE CELLO SUITES
The Cello Suites
The Cello Suites tells a multi-layered story of mystery, passion, history, and politics surrounding an epic piece of music by Johann Sebastian Bach. The award-winning book was a No. 1 national best-seller in Canada and has been translated into nine languages.
STUDIO GRACE
Studio Grace
Studio Grace chronicles a year-long adventure in which Eric Siblin records a dozen original pop songs while musing about creative inspiration. Along the way we meet veteran instrumentalists, producers with clashing philosophies, and a clutch of superb singers ranging from R&B performer Shaharah to YouTube teen sensation Hayley Richman. The book's publication coincides with the release of an album of the same name. The songs can be found on iTunes, streaming sites, and on this website.
The Fatal Scroll
The Fatal Scroll:
A Herculaneum Mystery
Publication date: May 2025
Cover design by David Drummond
Marcus Sinclair is a history teacher whose life is stuck in neutral when he inherits a papyrus scroll from his antiquarian uncle. The mysterious scroll might contain a lost masterpiece from ancient Rome or perhaps an ancient recipe for personal tranquility, but it’s unreadable unless Marcus can figure out a way to unroll the scroll without destroying it. His quest takes him to Naples, where he befriends a Google software engineer days before the man is found dead. Marcus is interviewed by an investigative journalist, Kristi Grainger, and they find themselves on parallel paths leading to a Neapolitan trafficker in antiquities, a tech mogul obsessed with the distant past, and a clutch of academics searching for the lost library of Herculaneum. In a seaside city that is by turns lush and lethal, Marcus must confront the unraveling of more than a scroll.
This novel is inspired by a real place — the Villa dei Papri, the only library from antiquity to have survived — and coincides with the Vesuvius Challenge, a real-life international competition to decipher Herculaneum scrolls.
About the author
Eric Siblin
Eric Siblin is a writer with interests in history, music, hockey, and olive oil. Educated at Concordia University in Montreal, he has worked as a staff reporter for The Canadian Press and The Montreal Gazette. His first book, The Cello Suites, explores the multi-layered story of an epic composition by Johann Sebastian Bach. The Cello Suites was a No. 1 national best-seller in Canada and named an Economist Book of the Year for 2010. It won the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction, and the McAuslan First Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award (Non-Fiction), the Writers’ Trust of Canada Non-Fiction Prize, and British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. It has been translated into nine languages. Studio Grace, published in 2015 to coincide with an album of the same name, is his second book.