The Piano Tuner

By Chiang-sheng Kuo

Book Overview

This bestseller and winner of every major literary award in Taiwan is an elegiac novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate hearts--and 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 Taipei's 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 "writer's writer," Chiang-Sheng Kuo delivers a stunningly powerful, compact novel in The Piano Tuner. It's 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 Mann's Death in Venice, Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes, and Yasunari Kawabata's 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1956763414
• ISBN13: 9781956763416
• Release Date: January 2023
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.3"