**In his debut novel, rock legend Pete Townshend explores the anxiety of modern life and madness in a story that stretches across two generations of a London family, their lovers, collaborators, and friends.** A former rock star disappears on the Cumberland moors. When his wife finds him, she discovers he has become a hermit and a painter of apocalyptic visions. An art dealer has drug-induced visions of demonic faces swirling in a bedstead and soon his wife disappears, nowhere to be found. A beautiful Irish girl who has stabbed her father to death is determined to seduce her best friend’s husband. A young composer begins to experience aural hallucinations, expressions of the fear and anxiety of the people of London. He constructs a maze in his back garden. Driven by passion and musical ambition, events spiral out of control — good drugs and bad drugs, loves lost and found, families broken apart and reunited. Conceived jointly as an opera, *The Age of Anxiety* deals with mythic and operatic themes. Hallucinations and soundscapes haunt this novel in an extended meditation on manic genius and the dark art of creativity.