The Piano Tuner

Immediately sold to eighteen foreign publishers, The Piano Tuner is an astonishing fiction debut poised to become an international phenomenon.

In the fall of 1886, piano tuner Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War Office: he must leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma, where a rare Erard grand piano is in need of repair. The piano belongs to the eccentric Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll, whose unorthodox peacekeeping methods have brought a tentative quiet to the region but have raised questions from his superiors about his loyalty.

On his journey to Burma — across Europe, the Red Sea, and India — Edgar encounters prophets and thieves, soldiers and tale spinners, and an enchanting woman as elusive as the surgeon-major will turn out to be. And in Burma, Edgar encounters a place more mysterious and dangerous than he ever could have imagined.

Sensuous, lyrical, rich with passion with adventure, this is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance, and self-discovery: an unforgettable novel.

"A smart, entertaining adventure." Christian Science Monitor

"An extraordinary piece of work. The Piano Tuner is a novel of journeys and the shifting grounds of perception, but at heart it is a story of the human urge to be absorbed fully into life, to cease to be a bystander, to be thrust into the essential dreamscape of human strivings. Daniel Mason's debut is shining and striking. He transported me thoroughly, well beyond the initial reading. Days later, the scenes shift and stir and agitate within me. This is writing of deep potency and resonance. Of beauty and pain and all things in between." Jeffrey Lent, author of In the Fall and Lost Nation

An extraordinary first novel that tells the story of a British piano tuner sent deep into Burma in the nineteenth century.

In October 1886, Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War Office: he must leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma, where a rare Erard grand piano is in need of repair. The piano belongs to an army surgeon-major whose unorthodox peacemaking methods—poetry, medicine, and now music—have brought a tentative quiet to the southern Shan States but have elicited questions from his superiors.

On his journey through Europe, the Red Sea, India, and into Burma, Edgar meets soldiers, mystics, bandits, and tale-spinners, as well as an enchanting woman as elusive as the surgeon-major. And at the doctors fort on a remote Burmese river, Edgar encounters a world more mysterious and dangerous than he ever could have imagined.

Sensuous, lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, this is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance, and self-discovery: an unforgettable novel.

Daniel Mason received his bachelor's degree in biology from Harvard College in 1998, and spent a year researching malaria on the Thai-Myanmar border, where much of The Piano Tuner was written. He is currently a medical student at the University of California at San Francisco.