A New York Times Notable Book A San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year “A gripping and resonant novel. . . . It immerses the reader in a distant world with startling immediacy and ardor. . . . Riveting.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times In 1886 a shy, middle-aged piano tuner named Edgar Drake receives an unusual commission from the British War Office: to travel to the remote jungles of northeast Burma and there repair a rare piano belonging to an eccentric army surgeon who has proven mysteriously indispensable to the imperial design. From this irresistible beginning, The Piano Tuner launches readers into a world of seductive, vibrantly rendered characters, and enmeshes them in an unbreakable spell of storytelling.

In The Piano Tuner, Peter Meinke writes of the foreignness that awaits us when we go abroad and when we answer our own front door to admit a stranger, that confronts us in unfamiliar cities and villages and in the equally disquieting surroundings of our memories and regrets. Often in these stories, what seems a safe, comfortable environment turns suddenly threatening. In the title story, a writer's quiet existence amid his antiques and books is dismantled, piece by piece, by a demonic, beer-bellied piano tuner. In "The Ponoes," a man recalls how, as a young boy living in Brooklyn during World War II, he became a collaborationist in the brutal pranks of two Irish bullies. In "The Twisted River," the sedate collegiality of a Polish university is disrupted when an American on a Fulbright grant attempts to blackmail two faculty members. And in "The Bracelet," a young anthropology student doing field work in Africa finds herself drawn further and further into the role of a priestess of Oshun, into a life dictated by the configuration of cowry shells cast upon the floor. Meinke writes of a world where our control over our lives seldom exists across a border, and often extends no further than our fingertips. Attempts to bridge two cultures, two lives are sometimes successful, as when an actor finds love in the arms of a tough-talking barmaid, but more usually lead to disillusionment, as when a hard-drinking salesman's career is shattered after he is drunk under the table one night by a Polish engineer, or when an English father struggles to find common ground with his American son. Riveting, almost terrifying, the stories in The Piano Tuner tell of decent men and women caught in events that they could never have predicted, would never have chosen.

Provides all the information needed for restoring and maintaining pianos, both for professionals and amateurs.

Welcome to the humourous and adult world of Mr. D'elia, the Piano Tuner, as it leaps from the imagination of creator Ignacio Noe.

Ingrid Silvian has written a memorable story for children that will help them understand what it was really like to live through events of WWII, how children just like them adapt and survive. Through vignettes in the lives of two young girl friends, one Jewish, one Christian, we experience how everything changed when the Nazis came. Silvian provides a child's eye view of war, both mundane and profound a shift from marbles to shrapnel as the treasure of choice; racing to catch the last train carrying evacuees out of the city and ultimately, who was saved and who was sacrificed. At a time when many of the first hand witnesses of this chilling chapter of history are passing away, Silvian's story provides a valuable link that reaches across generations that will live on in the hearts and minds of a new generation of children. Pam Spence, editor, Ohio Jewish Chronicle, Columbus, OH

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