Author: Daniel Mason
Publisher: Picador India
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 357
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0330492675
Description
Sensuous and lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, The Piano Tuner is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance and self-discovery. It is an unforgettable and haunting novel.
On a misty London afternoon in 1886, Piano tuner Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the War Office: he must leave his wife, and his quiet life in London, to travel to the jungles of Burma to tune a rare 1840 Erard grand piano. The piano belongs to Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, an enigmatic British officer, whose success at making peace in the war-torn Shan States is legendary, but whose unorthodox methods have begun to attract suspicion.
So begins the journey of the soft-spoken Edgar across Europe, the Red Sea, India, Burma, and at last into the remote highlands of the Shan States. En route he is entranced by the Doctor’s letters and by the shifting cast of tale-spinners, soldiers and thieves who cross his path. As his captivation grows, however, so do his questions: about the Doctor’s true motives, about an enchanting and elusive woman who travels with him into the jungle, about why he has come. And, ultimately, about whether he will ever be able to return home unchanged to the woman who awaits him there.
The Shan Hills, Edgar repeated and stared past the temples that stood like soldiers in formation to the mountains, which rose abruptly from the plain and seemed to hover in the sky. He thought of a river which ran through those hills, and how somewhere, hidden in the darkness, a man waited, who perhaps stared out at the same sky, but who had yet to know his name.
EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:
Daniel Mason has woven together an elegant and unusually engrossing story, one that offers the reader the best possible journey - into a world that no longer exists. Rich, atmospheric and evocative of the sights, smells and textures of nineteenth-century Burma, The Piano
Tuner is an astonishingly accomplished first novel. I truly enjoyed it.
- Arthur Golden, Author of Memories of a Geisha.