The Piano Tuner: A Novel

Daniel Mason

Dec 2003 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

Set in the late 1880s, an English piano tuner is practically ordered by the British War Office to visit Burma in order to tune a fancy piano for an army doctor that is doing the Good Imperial Work in the hinterlands near the Siamese border. The first couple hundred pages are slowly rolled out with his leave-taking of his wife of 18 years and his travel all the way to southeast Asia. In Burma, the piano tuner – and the reader – mainly kills time, waiting for something terrible to happen. The descriptions of the geography have great interest. I like novels in which expatriates are besotted by the beauty of a new place, so the nature writing is the best part of the novel, Too true that the characters are thin, the incidents few, the pace slow, But given the writer's intention was to evoke a particular place and time, I think he succeeded.

This is a wonderful book!!!! I like books with a surprise twist on the ending. And this gives you just that. I highly recommend this book for anyone to read. You won't be disappointed. -ndoka2002

Slow moving book.

About the author

Daniel Mason was born and raised in Northern California. He studied biology at Harvard, and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. His first novel, The Piano Tuner, published in 2002, was a national bestseller and has since been published in 27 countries. His other works include A Far Country, The Winter Soldier, and A Registry of My Passage Upon Earth, and his writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine and Lapham's Quarterly. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.