Up the Creek Book Club
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© 2000 Kathy Craig |
The Piano Tuner
by Daniel Mason
November 2003
Synopsis
"In October 1886, Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War Office: he must leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma, where a rare Erard grand piano is in need of repair. The piano belongs to an army surgeon-major whose unorthodox peacemaking methods - poetry, medicine, and now music - have brought a tentative quiet to the southern Shan States, but have elicited questions from his superiors."
"On his journey through Europe, the Red Sea, India, and into Burma, Edgar meets soldiers, mystics, bandits, and talespinners, as well as an enchanting woman as elusive as the surgeon-major. And at the doctor's fort on a remote Burmese river, Edgar encounters a world more mysterious and dangerous than he ever could have imagined." (Publisher)
Reviews
- "A seductive and lyrical novel that probes the brutalities and compromises of colonization, even as it celebrates the elusive powers of music and the imagination."
(Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)
- "Richly imagined, The Piano Tuner winds like a lazy river, carrying the reader into the mythic land of Kipling and Conrad." (People)
- "Luminous...Mason's writing achieves that kind of reverie in which every vision, tone, flavor and sensation is magnified." (Bernadette Murphy, Los Angeles Times)
- "Intoxicating, full of sights to see, histories to learn, stories to entertain." (Anne Stephenson, USA Today)
Book Club Rating and Comments
If you or your book club has read this book and would like to share your comments, please email us at upthecreekbc@yahoo.com.