The Piano Tuner

Description

One misty London afternoon in 1886, piano tuner Edgar Drake receives an unusual request from the War Office: he must leave his quiet life and travel to the jungles of Burma to repair a rare grand piano owned by an enigmatic army surgeon. So begins an extraordinary journey across Europe, the Red Sea, India and onwards, accompanied by an enchanting yet elusive woman. Edgar is at first captivated, then unnerved, as he begins to question the true motive behind his summons and whether he will return home unchanged to the wife who awaits him... An instant bestseller, The Piano Tuner has been published in 27 countries. Exquisitely told, it is a richly sensuous story of adventure, discovery, and how we confront our most deeply held fears and desires.

Daniel Mason received his bachelor's degree in biology at Harvard in 1998 and spent a year studying malaria on the Thailand-Myanmar border, where much of his debut, The Piano Tuner, was written. He studied medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Engrossing . . . the reader falls under the spell that the author is weaving, surrendering to the story's exotic magic * The Times * Remarkable . . . a novel that immerses the reader in a distant world with startling immediacy and ardor -- Michiko Kakutani * New York Times * A virtuoso tale, cast in the Burmese colonial wars of the 1880s . . . Mason [adds] a depth of quirky historical knowledge and a feel for the brutal politics of colonialism, to create a complex and subtly imagined adventure . . . with echoes of other books: Heart of Darkness, of course, and A Handful of Dust . . . a highly dextrous and involving performance * Observer * Intriguing and alluring . . . those strange images of Europe meeting the east, of the east engulfing Europe, linger like a haunting tune * Guardian * An ambitious, adventuresome, highly unusual first novel that offers pleasures too rarely encountered in contemporary American literary fiction . . . [Mason is] a gifted, original and courageous writer * Washington Post * Luminous . . . Mason's writing achieves that kind of reverie in which every vision, tone, flavor and sensation is magnified * Los Angeles Times *