"For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. She gave up on her own career as a concert pianist many years ago, but her husband Bowen, an executive at a car company, has long rebuffed her pleas to have a child. He resists even when his mother arrives from the southwestern Chinese region of Yunnan and begins her own campaign for a grandchild. As tension in the household...

A surrealistic novel about a man who finds himself in a strange city, not knowing what he's doing there, but whom everyone seems to know. What's more, he must be important because people ask him for favors. As he goes from encounter to encounter, he ultimately discovers himself.

Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. But Elf's latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Can she be nursed back to "health" in time? Does it matter? As the situation becomes ever...

A mesmerizing debut novel about a concert pianist who fears he is losing his mind Mr. Field wants a new life, a life cleansed of the old one's disappointments. A concert pianist on the London scene, his career is upended when the train he is travelling on crashes into the wall at the end of a tunnel. The accident splinters his left wrist, jeopardizing his musical ambitions. On a whim, he uses his compensation pay-out to buy a house he has seen only...

"In a city mysteriously overflowing with meat, a museum is bombed, a classical piano player hooked on snuff films throws himself off a building, a charismatic but misled political organizer has disappeared, and a young immigrant navigates a crumbling continent. A dystopic work of hope, Phototaxis dismantles and rebuilds worlds with language at turns surreal, scathingly comic, poetic, and revolutionary."--

A second-time-around romance between Michael, a violinist and Julia, a pianist. He runs into her on a London bus and learns she is married to a banker and has a son. They resume their love, but drama lies ahead as Julia is going deaf. By the author of A Suitable Boy.

"A woman and her young son flee to a convent on a remote island off the Breton coast of France. Generations of seafarers have named the place de la Brume, or Fog Island. In a chapel high on a cliff, a tragic death occurs and a terrified child vanishes into the mist. The child's godmother, Maggie O'Shea, haunted by the violent deaths of both her husband and her best friend, has withdrawn from her life as a classical pianist. But then a recording of...

"In a small coastal town just a stone's throw from Tokyo, a prestigious piano competition is underway. Over the course of two feverish weeks, three students will experience some of the most joyous-and painful-moments of their lives. Though they don't know it yet, each will profoundly and unpredictably change the others, forever. Aya was a child prodigy who abruptly gave up performing after the death of her mother, and is now trying for a comeback;...

Sparkly and charming Natalie Fincher has it all, a handsome new husband, a fixer-upper cottage of her dreams, and the opportunity to tour with the musical she's spent years writing. But when her husband suddenly dies, all her hopes and dreams instantly disappear. But when someone begins to mysteriously leave the sheet music for her husband's favorite songs at the train station's public piano, Natalie begins to feel a sense of hope and excitement for...

The last thing Rudy expected was to wake up one Saturday morning, a widow at fifty-four years old. Now, ten months after the untimely death of his beloved wife, he's still not sure how to move on from the defining tragedy of his life-but his new job is helping. After being downsized from his finance position, Rudy turned to his first love: the piano. Some people might be embarrassed to work as the piano player at Nordstrom, but for Rudy, there's joy...