In 2010, violinist and erstwhile child prodigy, 31-year-old Min Kym was with her partner in a Pret A Manger at Euston station, when her 1696 Stradivarius was stolen from under the table. Kym was so devastated at the loss of “her” instrument, that she descended into a depression and, for a while, couldn’t bear to play. Three years later, the story hit the headlines again, when the Stradivarius was recovered. Seemingly, it was a wonderful fairy tale ending, though, as Kym details in this powerful bruising memoir, the reality was far more complex.

Billed as a memoir of “love, loss and betrayal”, Gone could easily have been subtitled “The rise and painful fall of a child prodigy”. Kym’s South Korean family relocated to Britain once her immense natural talent was discovered. From there, Kym’s achievements and accolades flowed like their own kind of beautiful albeit poignant music. At seven, she became the youngest person to win a place at the Purcell School of Music, by her early teens, she was performing with international orchestras. By the time the Stradivarius was stolen, Kym had an album ready for release and a world tour planned, and was hailed as one of the most talented violinists in the world.

However, there was a price to pay – not least any semblance of a normal childhood. Already Kym’s Korean heritage, rooted in obedience, made her feel conflicted (Korean at home, English outside the home). Her mechanical engineer father was largely absent working, and you wouldn’t need a qualification in cod-psychology to posit the link to the series of charismatic demanding older men who became her tutors. In many ways, this was an occupational hazard – to play at Kym’s level, you need to be disciplined. However, Kym felt dominated, controlled, a “performing puppet”. Rebelling against one of her early tutors, she broods: “The little diamond was tired of being taken out and polished.” There were times when even her extraordinary potential felt like a burden: “It’s lying in wait for you like a dragon sleeping across the mouth of a cave.”

What appear to be long-suppressed bursts of resentment crackle through these passages – with Kym eventually, though only briefly and regretfully, erupting at the mother she adores. It’s no surprise when Kym reveals that she suffered from anorexia in youth. While another musician’s comment was the trigger (“No one wants to see a fat performer”), the disease seems bound up in, not only the grinding perfectionist pressure that Kym places upon herself, but also the loneliness and otherness she feels. As her prized mentor, US violinist, Ruggiero Ricci, tells her: “Only prodigies recognise other prodigies.”

Kym’s love for music and composers (Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Prokofiev, Paganini, Mendelssohn) pulses through this book, providing an intriguing education for a layperson such as myself (There’s an album tie-in of Kym’s performances, if you’re interested – I know I am). However, at the core, there’s a passionate love story: the one between Kym and “her” Stradivarius – the violin she had to have, despite the fact that she had to remortgage her home to afford the then-£450,000 to buy it. Kym’s relationship with the instrument seems at once intoxicating and somewhat toxic. Her entire identity seems to be wrapped up in it, her dark symbiotic twin – she calls it “the One”, her “soulmate”.

When the theft occurs it’s as devastating as it’s complicated. Kym is shaken when her partner at the time (another person she feels controlled by) seems keen to propagate the story that the violin was at her feet, not his, when it was stolen. After they split, in a weird twist, he’s at the centre of a deal, enabling Kym to buy back her recovered Stradivarius, but only for the briefest of moments before it’s re-sold. This is the essential tragedy and irony of the book – after everything that happens, Kym can’t even afford to keep “her” beloved violin, and is forced to give it up, and not even to another player, but to an investor. This, she says, is the nature of the industry now – instruments like her Stradivarius “don’t earn their keep in the concert hall, they earn their keep in the dark”.

The loss of the violin represents the “Gone” of this remarkable and original memoir, though only in the context of all the other things that are taken – Kym’s childhood, her future, her spirit, her trust in people, her sense of identity. How thrilling then that, eventually, Kym’s agonising attempts to recover are rewarded with another violin (an Amati) to love, and, with it, a sense that the future could be hers to own again

• Gone: A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung is published by Viking (£14.99). To order a copy for £11.24 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846