The Weight of a Piano

"Emotions resonate across time in Chris Canders’s absorbing tale." - Guardian

"Intense and imaginative." - The New York Times

“Cander grabs the reader in her bravura, thickly detailed opening pages.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Impossible to put down and impossible to forget.” - Library Journal (starred review)

A dazzling exploration of how the human heart can both break and be restored

Hidden in dense forests high in the Romanian mountains, where the winters were especially cold and long, were spruce trees that would be made into pianos: exquisite instruments famous for the warmth of their tone and beloved by the likes of Schumann and Liszt. One man alone knew how to choose them . . .

The Weight of a Piano is a tour-de-force about two women and the piano that inexorably ties their lives together through time and across continents.

In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life, a Blüthner piano built by a master piano-maker at the turn of the century in Germany. In 2012, in California, twenty-six-year-old Clara Lundy loses another boyfriend and again has to find a new apartment, a situation which is further complicated by the gift her father had given her for her twelfth birthday: a Blüthner piano. The mysterious—and tragic—connections between Katya and Clara unravel gradually yet thrillingly in Chris Cander’s powerful novel about attraction, obsession, creative passion, love and loss.

“This is a powerful tale of how we live with grief, with what we hang on to of the people we love and the joy and pain of memory…a riveting read.” - Paul Burke NB Magazine