Here are 100 books that The Piano Teacher fans have personally recommended if you like
The Piano Teacher.
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From Taylor Swift to Lauryn Hill, from Joan Baez to Beyonce, I find that the lyrics, performances, and melodies of women making music inspire my own creativity every day. I am not a musician; I am a writer, editor, and novelist! But I find music to be so accessible, so deeply meaningful, in a way that other art forms, even my own, are not. So naturally, I adore novels about music!
This one was just so fun to dip into and get lost in! An imaginary oral history of a 70s band that somehow manages to be a page-turner, a chaste love affair whose heat is all contained in the songs, lyrics, and performances. It’s a contemporary classic for a reason! Don’t miss it!
I’m Jill Santopolo, a novelist, editor, and mom who was born in New York and currently lives in Washington, DC. I’ve written Everything After, More Than Words, and The Light We Lost, which was the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick in February 2018. My books have been named to The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Apple, and Indiebound bestseller lists, and have been translated into more than 35 languages. I love Instagram and rarely ever use Twitter (but you can find me there, too)--and music makes my heart sing. When I was growing up I learned to play the piano, flute, and piccolo, and I loved singing and dancing.
Tracey Garvis Graves’s novel about second chances and starting over is filled with so much warmth, it’s impossible not to cheer for her characters and to feel true empathy for their situations. Newly-divorced Layla discovers she had to make peace with her past to find love in her present—and music is the key to it all.
From Tracey Garvis Graves, the bestselling author of The Girl He Used to Know comes a love song of a story about starting over and second chances in Heard It in a Love Song.
Love doesn’t always wait until you’re ready.
Layla Hilding is thirty-five and recently divorced. Struggling to break free from the past―her glory days as the lead singer in a band and a ten-year marriage to a man who never put her first―Layla’s newly found independence feels a lot like loneliness.
Then there's Josh, the single dad whose daughter attends the elementary school where Layla teaches music.…
I’m Jill Santopolo, a novelist, editor, and mom who was born in New York and currently lives in Washington, DC. I’ve written Everything After, More Than Words, and The Light We Lost, which was the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick in February 2018. My books have been named to The New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Apple, and Indiebound bestseller lists, and have been translated into more than 35 languages. I love Instagram and rarely ever use Twitter (but you can find me there, too)--and music makes my heart sing. When I was growing up I learned to play the piano, flute, and piccolo, and I loved singing and dancing.
Renee Carlino’s book about being in love—and loving music—when you’re in your early 20s is the kind of story that feels like time travel. She captures life and love and grief and confusion so perfectly. And for anyone who has ever found guitar players sexy, well, I bet Will will win your heart.
Mia Kelly thinks she has it all figured out. She's an Ivy League graduate, a classically trained pianist, and the beloved daughter of a sensible mother and offbeat father. Yet Mia has been stalling since graduation, torn between putting her business degree to use and exploring music, her true love.
When her father unexpectedly dies, she decides to pick up the threads of his life while she figures out her own. Uprooting herself from Ann Arbor to New York City, Mia takes over her father's cafe, a treasured neighbourhood institution that plays host to undiscovered musicians and artists. She's denied…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I started writing my debut novel Kismet during the 2020 covid lockdown. I was quarantining in my small NYC apartment and, like many, wishing I could be anywhere else. Enter: the power of books. I’ve always loved reading for how it transports you around the world. My novel takes place in the eponymous sun-soaked beach town of Kismet, Fire Island, and writing it offered an escape. It reminded me of how reading books like below felt like embarking on my very own magical getaway, from Positano or London, to Alaska or Palm Springs, all from the comfort of home. I hope you find similar adventure in these novels’ pages.
If you’ve ever wanted to take an Alaskan cruise, The Unsinkable Greta Jamesis the perfect book for you.
The sights are breathtaking, the cruise culture is endearingly infectious, but it’s with the characters where this novel truly sings. And I don’t only mean that metaphorically speaking: the titular protagonist Greta James is a famous indie musician who has followed her career to great success, despite her father’s discouragement of the unstable path.
When Greta’s mother unexpectedly passes away, she decides to take her mom’s spot on the Alaskan cruise that her parents had booked to celebrate their anniversary. Over the course of the trip, Greta and her father must reconcile their differences, grieve their aching loss, and find a way back to each other.
An indie musician reeling from tragedy and a public breakdown reconnects with her father on a weeklong cruise in “a pitch-perfect story about the ways we recover love in the strangest places” (Rebecca Serle, bestselling author of In Five Years)
“The characters are drawn with a generosity that allows them to be wrong but also right, loving but also prone to missteps, and ultimately deserving of a resolution that’s full of hope.”—Linda Holmes, New York Times bestselling author of Flying Solo
Right after the sudden death of her mother—her first and most devoted fan—and just before the launch of her…
I fell in love with historical fiction when I was a child. Adventurous tales—especially if they had swordplay in them! And I was fascinated by young people having to choose whether to stand up for what they believed in or run away. Ordinary folk are forced by circumstances—and villains—to do the extraordinary. I empathized and felt like I could be one of them. So when I came to write, I wanted to tell those kinds of stories. I eventually realized what I wrote was 'the intimate epic'—showing how the minor historical players can have a major effect.
This book takes the lives of very ordinary Canadians and throws them into the maelstrom of war. I love that it carefully sets up a world few know about—Toronto in the 1930s—and shows the ambiguity of the times, how anti-Semitism was at home as well as across the water in Europe.
I so enjoyed the Romeo and Juliet love affair at the novel's heart, and I was moved by the trials love is subjected to—as well as shocked by excellent descriptions of war's brutality.
Inspired by a little-known chapter of World War II history, a young Protestant girl and her Jewish neighbour are caught up in the terrible wave of hate sweeping the globe on the eve of war in this powerful love story that’s perfect for fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
If you’re reading this letter, that means I’m dead. I had obviously hoped to see you again, to explain in person, but fate had other plans.
1933
At eighteen years old, Molly Ryan dreams of becoming a journalist, but instead she spends her days working any job…
I’m a Chinese Vietnamese American author who writes about the Asian girls I never saw in books as a kid. Growing up in Southern California, I was part of an Asian community that was extremely diverse—a reality that was rarely reflected in American pop culture. For years, I longed to see messy, flawed, fully humanized Asian characters in all different kinds of stories, not just the typical child-of-immigrant narratives. As a result, I now spend a lot of time thinking about representation (whether I want to or not!), and I’m always looking for writers who pull it off with nuance and realism. I hope you’ll find these books are great examples of that.
I’m always struck by how modern Eileen Chang’s voice feels to me, even though her stories take place in China decades ago.
Little Reunions, for instance, opens with the main character Julie facing her school exams just before the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during WWII. But I found it easy to identify with Julie—her observations, her longings, and even her pettiness.
It’s one thing to read about a character who would get your background; it’s another to read about a character who would get you. In Little Reunions, I got both.
A best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privilege, bad romance, and political intrigue during World War II in China.
Now available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang’s dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan. The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced, it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run the…
Growing up near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, I was aware that the city had historical significance but also that it wasn’t particularly famous, at least to people from outside the region. I’ve always been drawn to these sorts of overlooked stories from history, which are, not coincidentally, often women’s stories. Women made up the majority of workers in Oak Ridge during World War II, and for decades afterward, their stories were generally viewed as less important than male-dominated narratives of the war. But I’ve always believed that women’s stories are no less interesting than men’s. These books look at history’s worst conflict from unique perspectives that foreground the female experience.
Though these collected stories were popular in Chang’s native China when first published in the 1940s, decades passed before they were translated into English. The title story brings war-torn Hong Kong to life, but even against the most dramatic political backdrop, Chang’s focus is firmly on women and relationships. Though the time and place may seem remote, readers will find universal emotions in these carefully constructed tales.
Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships by one of the greatest writers of 20th century China.
A New York Review Books Original
“[A] giant of modern Chinese literature” –The New York Times
"With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can…
I was born in colonial Hong Kong, and my teenage rebellion was anti-colonialism. So I went on a journey to rediscover ‘mother China’ by reading and visiting the Mainland. What I saw and learned first-hand contradicted what I had read of China, primarily Communist Party propaganda. The realization that colonial Hong Kong treated its people so much better than in socialist China made me think, and started my interest in researching the history of Hong Kong. A Modern History of Hong Kong: 1841-1997 is the result, and based on years of research into the evolution of Hong Kong’s people, its British colonial rulers, as well as China’s policies towards Hong Kong.
This is a cogent book on how Hong Kong’s Government has squandered a magnificent inheritance, a vibrant, energetic, and entrepreneurial people willing to engage with the government by neglecting their social rights. Goodstadt does so by examining housing, medical services, and education policy, as well as Hong Kong’s all important relationship with Mainland China. It is a readable piece of serious scholarship by someone who had served as the head of the government’s Central Policy Unit for over a decade in British Hong Kong. It explains the background to the social discontent that underpinned the massive protests of 2019, which triggered a dramatic change in China’s policy towards Hong Kong.
A City Mismanaged traces the collapse of good governance in Hong Kong, explains its causes, and exposes the damaging impact on the community’s quality of life. Leo Goodstadt argues that the current well-being and future survival of Hong Kong have been threatened by disastrous policy decisions made by chief executives and their principal officials. Individual chapters look at the most shocking examples of mismanagement: the government’s refusal to implement the Basic Law in full; official reluctance to halt the large-scale dilapidation of private sector homes into accommodation unfit for habitation; and ministerial toleration of the rise of new slums. Mismanagement…
I got hooked on mystery novels as a kid reading the Encyclopedia Brown stories. Something about the combination of a great story and a puzzle to solve is irresistible to me. As a historian, I’m interested in communities, and especially how people understood themselves as being part of the new kinds of economic, political, and cultural communities that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. When I learned about Dorothy L. Sayers’ lifelong writing group, the wryly named ‘Mutual Admiration Society’, I was thrilled at the chance to combine my professional interests with my personal passion for detective fiction.
This set of interlocked novellas opens with a comatose detective – a legend in his time – apparently conducting an interrogation through means of electrical signals sent from his brain to a computer. I was skeptical.
I’m a fan of the rules that Sayers and the Detection Club developed: no magic, no ‘jiggery-pokery’, no mystery poisons or miracle drugs, only the fair play of putting the evidence before the reader and letting them practice deduction. My skepticism was totally misplaced.
Chan Ho-Kei’s brilliant work tells the history of twentieth-century Hong Kong through the careers of two policemen. Each novella pays homage to the classic genres of crime fiction, and they build up to twists and revelations that are both shocking and completely faithful to fair play as Sayers knew it.
Six interlocking stories.
One spellbinding novel.
The year is 2013, and Hong Kong's greatest detective is dying. For fifty years, Inspector Kwan quietly solved cases while the world changed around him. Now his partner Detective Lok has come to his deathbed for help with one final case.
Where there is murder, there is humanity. This bold and intricate crime novel spans five decades of love, honour, race, class, jealousy and revenge in one of the most intriguing nations in the world.
This is the story of a man who let justice shine in the space between black and white. This…
This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a…
I’ve spent a lifetime as a professional classical musician and a mystery reader. Starting with Hardy Boys adventures at the same time I started playing the violin, my intertwined love affairs with music and the mystery genre continue to this day. As a long-time member of major American symphony orchestras, I’ve heard and experienced so many stories about the dark corners of the classical music world that they could fill a library. It gives me endless pleasure to read other mystery authors’ take on this fascinating, semi-cloistered world and to share some of my own tales with the lay public in my Daniel Jacobus mystery series.
The setting is roiling Hong Kong just before the British turnover to China. A musician in the Hong Kong Philharmonic, searching for an unaccountably missing friend and colleague, becomes sucked into the back alleys of organized crime. Martin himself was a veteran professional orchestral string bass player in Hong Kong and has a consummate grasp of the pulse of the city and the vagaries of the music business. This gritty, rough-and-tumble page-turning thriller, with dialogue as spicy as the food and a noire feel, is an under-the-radar gem that in a fair world should be a best-seller. May be hard to find but so worth the effort.
The body of a young woman washes up in Hong Kong harbour. To Inspector Herman Lok of the Hong Kong Police Force it appears to be an acccidental death - a fisherwoman who drowned. But Lok soon discovers that the woman is linked not just to the triads, the city's infamous criminal societies, but also to an organization not usually associated with murder and conspiracy - the Hong Kong Symphony Orchestra.
Meanwhile Hector Siefert, an American musician living in Hong Kong, learns that his colleague for Leo Stern has disappeared. Enlisting the help of a newspaper reporter with the unlikely…
