The Piano Tuner

This bestseller and winner of every major literary award in Taiwan is an elegiac novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate heartsand music: "A delightful read."Ha Jin A widower grieving for his young wife. A piano tuner concealing a lifetime of secrets. An out-of-tune Steinway piano. A journey of self-discovery across time and continents, from a dark apartment in Taipeis red-light district to snow-clad New York. At the heart of the story is the nameless narrator, the piano tuner. In his forties, he is balding and ugly, a loser by any standard. But he was once a musical prodigy. What betrayal and what heartbreak made him walk away from greatness? Long hailed in Taiwan as a writers writer, Chiang-Sheng Kuo delivers a stunningly powerful, compact novel in The Piano Tuner. Its a book of sounds: both of music and of the heart, from Rachmaninoff to Schubert, from Glenn Gould to Sviatoslav Richter, from untapped potential to unrequited love. With a cadence and precision that bring to mind Thomas Manns Death in Venice, Kazuo Ishiguros Nocturnes, and Yasunari Kawabatas Snow Country, this short novel may be a portrait of the artist as a failure, but it also describes a pursuit of the ultimate beauty in music and in love.