About The Weight of a Piano

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. . .

About Chris Cander

Chris Cander is a novelist, children's book author, screenplay writer, and writer-in-residence for Houston-based Writers in the Schools. Her new novel THE WEIGHT OF A PIANO is forthcoming from Knopf. Her novel WHISPER HOLLOW was selected as an Indie Next pick and nominated for the 2015 Kirkus Prize in fiction and her award-winning novel 11 STORIES was included in Kirkus's best indie general fiction of 2013. Her children's book THE WORD BURGLAR received the silver 2014 Moonbeam Children's Book Awards for Reading Skills & Literacy.