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CHRIS CANDER reads from her new novel THE WEIGHT OF A PIANO

The Weight of a Piano (Knopf Publishing Group)

A tour-de-force about two women and the piano that inexorably ties their lives together through time and across continents, for better and for worse.

In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life: a Blüthner piano, built at the turn of the century in Germany, on which she discovers everything that she herself can do with music and what music, in turn, does for her. Yet after marrying, she emigrates with her young family from Russia to America, at her husband's frantic insistence, and her piano is lost in the shuffle.

In 2012, in Bakersfield, California, twenty-six-year-old Clara Lundy loses another boyfriend and again has to find a new apartment, which is complicated by the gift her father had given her for her twelfth birthday, shortly before he and her mother died in a fire that burned their house down: a Blüthner upright she has never learned to play. Orphaned, she was raised by her aunt and uncle, who in his car-repair shop trained her to become a first-rate mechanic, much to the surprise of her subsequent customers. But this work, her true mainstay in a scattered life, is put on hold when her hand gets broken while the piano's being moved--and in sudden frustration she chooses to sell it. And what becomes crucial is who the most interested party turns out to be...

Chris Cander graduated from the Honors College at the University of Houston, in the city where she was raised and still lives, with her husband, daughter, and son. For seven years she has been a writer-in-residence for Writers in the Schools there. She serves on the Inprint advisory board and stewards several Little Free Libraries in her community. Her first novel,11 Stories, won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Popular Fiction, and her most recent, Whisper Hollow, was long-listed for the Great Santini Fiction Prize by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance. She is also the author of The Word Burglar, which won the 2014 Moonbeam Children's Book Award (silver).

Photo by Lauren Volness

Event date: 
Wednesday, February 27, 2019 - 7:30pm
Event address: 
1818 N Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
The Weight of a Piano: A novel By Chris Cander Cover Image
$26.95
Possibly out of print. Email or call to check availability and price.
ISBN: 9780525654674
Published: Knopf - January 22nd, 2019

Whisper Hollow: A Novel By Chris Cander Cover Image
$17.95
ISBN: 9781590517116
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Other Press - March 17th, 2015

11 Stories By Chris Cander Cover Image
$14.00
ISBN: 9780988946507
Availability: Not in Stock. Available to Order.
Published: Rubber Tree Press - April 10th, 2013