As you may have spotted from Dua’s conversations with our past Monthly Read authors, and the subsequent playlists they’ve shared, music often plays an important part in the writing process. For many, certain songs help them shape key characters or find the right headspace to write.
Unless you're Jean-Baptiste Del Amo – author of Dua’s Monthly Read for February 2026, The Son of Man – who shares that: “I never write while listening to music.”
That’s not to say that music isn’t central to Jean-Baptiste's life. In fact, it’s precisely because he becomes so absorbed in the songs he listens to that silence is crucial to his creative process. Reflecting on previous attempts to write to a playlist, he notes: “The atmosphere and rhythm of what I was listening to influenced my relationship to the text and the rhythm of the sentences.”
When Jean-Baptiste isn’t writing, however, it’s a different story: “I listen to music all the time,” he says. “Here, I’ve chosen a few tracks I was listening to at the time I was writing The Son of Man – a mix of classical and rock/pop songs that, to me, correspond to certain atmospheres in the novel.”
The perfect playlist to soundtrack your reading.
