The Prague Sonata

The richness and accuracy of the historical backgrounds add to the story and the fully developed characters, which left me sometimes angry, sometimes content, sometimes sad, sometimes happy.

I felt that often, Morrow’s characters were hiding something. There were subplots that tantalized me and took me down new avenues, but Morrow always brought them back to the primary plot. And, of course, the beautiful prose. 

Finally, the complexity of the subplots, as Morrow weaved them into a coherent whole, left me humbled but also inspired to move from the “temporal linearity” of my own books to something more complex.

A young musicologist (that’s a real word—musicology is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music from a historic, cultural or systemic approach, as opposed to the study of music performance) is given some pieces of an uncredited but gorgeous sonata and must travel to Prague to figure out who wrote it. Beautifully written with tons of information about music and Prague through WWII, the Velvet Revolution (when the Communist party gave up and left), and life there today. I’d researched the city myself for a book which allowed me to play tour guide when my family visited. It’s… show more.