East Baton Rouge Parish Library

The weight of a piano, Chris Cander

eng

no index present

fiction

The weight of a piano

1097461187

Chris Cander

"In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the lover of her life: a Blüthner piano, built at the turn of the century in Germany, on which she discovers everything that she herself can do with music and what music, in turn, does for her. Yet after marrying, she emigrates--at her husband's frantic insistence--with her young family to America, and her piano is lost in the shuffle. In 2012, in Bakersfield, California, twenty-six-year-old Clara Lundy loses both her boyfriend and apartment, leading to an exasperating move that is complicated by the gift her father had given her for her twelfth birthday, shortly before he and her mother died in a house fire: a Blüthner upright she has never learned to play. Orphaned, she was raised by her aunt and uncle, who in his car repair shop trained her to become a first-rate mechanic, much to the surprise of some subsequent customers. But this work, her true mainstay in a scattered life, is put on hold when her hand gets broken while the piano is being moved--and in sudden frustrations she chooses to sell it. She has no problem finding a buyer, but what becomes crucial is who that most interested party turns out to be."--Dust jacket