It is the year 2000, a new millennium. Meta Taverner is a musicologist in New York. Her very promising concert pianist career was cut short by an accident, taking her down the academic path rather than that of performance. She loves her work, loves music, loves her city, living with lawyer boyfriend Jonathon. In a meeting with Irena, an elderly Czech woman, she is given the middle section of a piano sonata that had been entrusted to her by Irena's best friend Otylie as the Nazis invaded Prague in 1939. Otylie herself fled Prague with first part of the sonata, the third part she gave to her husband Jakub. In this way, she thought at least some of the sonata would survive the war and whatever else lay beyond. Irena wants Meta to reunite, if at all possible, the entire sonata and ensure its future safety.
Meta immediately realises she is holding something very rare and precious from the late 18th century. She doesn't know who the composer is but she knows that this is very special. Her life takes on a sudden and most unexpected direction as she literally drops everything and heads off to Prague to do whatever she can to find the other two parts and, like looking for a needle in a haystack, unite the entire sonata.
This is a fabulous yarn, notwithstanding it being too long. Some reviews are critical of how it doesn't move easily between the present and the past, but I didn't find this a problem at all. You do have to suspend belief just a bit - some pretty amazing coincidences! But it's a story, a novel, so we go along with it all. Prague sounds like the most beautiful place, with its own appalling history of revolution and suppression. And yet throughout people still find time for beautiful music, connections and relationships. A chunk of the story is set in Texas, so vastly different from Prague, and yet the writing is so vivid of the huge open spaces, the heat, the dust, the small towns. If you love music and history, this is for you.
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