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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik

THE PIANO TUNER

Johnny Kuo

The literary sensation that swept every major literary award in Taiwan, THE PIANO TUNER is an elegiac and deceptively quiet novel about sound and music, love and death, broken dreams and desolate hearts. The cadence and precision bring to mind Thomas Mann's A DEATH IN VENICE, Kazuo Ishiguro's NOCTURNES, and Yasunari Kawabata's SNOW COUNTRY.
A widower grieving for his young wife. A piano tuner hiding 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 all standards. But he was once a music prodigy. What betrayal and what heartbreak made him walk away from greatness?

Long hailed as a “writer's writer”, Johnny Kuo delivers a stunningly compact and powerful 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. This might be a portrait of the artist as a “failure”, but it is also a pursuit of the ultimate beauty in music and in love.

Johnny Kuo (b.1964) has been writing for more than 30 years and has won numerous awards for fiction and non-fiction. He has a PhD degree in Drama from NYU and was instrumental in establishing the MFA program at National Dong Hwa University. His first novel, BEWITCHED HOMELAND, won the Golden Tripod Award and was translated into Japanese. His memoir, SERIOUSLY SAD, won the Openbook Award, Golden Tripod Award, and Taiwan Literature Prize. He teaches at National Taipei University of Education.

*A Kingstone Ten Most Influential Book of the Year
*A Books.com Editor's Pick
*A Books.com Book of the Year
*Official “Books from Taiwan” Selection
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Published 2020-01-01 by Ecus

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