Sean Michaels owns not one but two theremins, although, truth is, he can't really play either.

"It requires very good muscle memory to get good at these subtle movements," the 32-year-old writer admits. "But there's also an element that's a little bit like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time. You are doing very different things with each hand."

The electronic instrument was invented in the 1920s by a Russian scientist, Lev Termen (known in the West as Leon Theremin), who gave it its name. It is played by moving your hands near - but not on - two antennae that control pitch and volume. It has been used on countless film soundtracks (it's woozy, wobbly alien sound is much loved by science fiction filmmakers) and by everyone from the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin to Portishead. (Fact fans might want to note that the instrument on Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys is in fact an electrotheremin - an entirely different instrument altogether.)

Imagine the sound it makes and you might have the appropriate soundtrack to Michaels's current mood. Disorientated. But in a good way. He is back at home in Montreal after a week of talking about writing and theremins. "I'm in a whirlwind of happiness and excitement," he says as the snow swirls outside.

The reason? A novel. His debut. It's called Us Conductors, it's about the theremin and its creator and it has just won Canada's premier arts award, the Giller Prize (which comes with a cheque for $100,00, Canadian money). "And it's for books. It's absurd," he says."

Us Conductors tells - with some liberties - the story of Termen. It follows the scientist's incredible biographical journey from revolutionary Russia to playing his invention alongside the New York Philharmonic in 1920s America and then back to Stalin's Russia.

In his time Termen was a Soviet spy, banished to the Gulags and an inventor of Soviet espionage technology. He met Lenin and Einstein, fell in love with a theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore (perhaps his true love) and married an African-American ballerina.

"I love true histories that seem like fictions and, by the same token, lies that feel true," Michaels explains. "The theremin's story had room for both of these - in its impossible sound, its electric magic and in Termen's life of music, espionage, music and love."

Michaels's own story, by contrast, is slightly less ornate. Born in Scotland, he spent his early years in Stirling before moving to Canada. He then returned to Scotland in 2004 for a few years to work in Edinburgh as a legal assistant. By then he had already started writing, contributing to a music blog Said the Gramophone, which led to paid journalism. But writing a novel was always the goal.

"I've always wanted to be a fiction writer. That was really what I dreamed of since I was a kid reading Light on Dumyat so many years ago. That book in particular because I used to go up Dumyat. I thought I could write this. 'That could be me one day'."

Rennie McOwan's classic children's book is not the only Scottish influence on Michaels. Though he grew up listening to his parents' classical music he discovered pop and indie rock in his late teens and it was Scottish bands - Belle and Sebastian, The Beta Band - that reminded him of the connection.

Even the soundtrack for his writing of Us Conductors, it turns out, was Grangemouth's finest, The Cocteau Twins.

"He even gave them a mention in his Giller acceptance speech. "That music is such an interesting mix of lovely singing and melodies with noisiness and indecipherableness," he says now.

"It's both direct and hidden and this book is very much about trying to hear a clear and beautiful message through noise, through dissonance."

Us Conductors -which has still to find a British publisher - is something that's been on the boil for a few years, it seems.

"Before I started writing the story, I'd had an eerie experience hearing the theremin about 10 years ago. I heard a piece of music on the radio that I thought was an opera singer singing - something really beautiful - and then I discovered it was a theremin.

"That, in combination with hearing the story of Lev and Clara from a friend of mine, and I started to think 'oh that could be something interesting to explore'.

"And the longer I went on with those kind of ideas bubbling away quietly they started to mingle with some of the questions I had about the strange ways we can be deceived by true love."

That's the keynote in Us Conductors. Turns out Sean Michaels might not be able to play the theremin, but he can record the noise of the human heart.

Us Conductors by Sean Michaels is published by Tin House Books