Wunderkind

Now in paperback, “Wunderkind is a gift for all the senses. Nikolai Grozni’s shimmering, visual, and visceral prose unfurls like music, as if a baby grand served as his infernal typewriter” (Patti Smith).

Brash, brilliant fifteen-year-old Konstantin is a world-class pianist of exceptional sensitivity whose rage at Soviet oppression threatens to destroy him. At once intelligent and arrogant, funny and despairing, compassionate and cruel, he exults in his rebellions: drinking and smoking in the attic of the music school, having careless sex with different girls while pining for a mercurial violin virtuoso, and refusing to participate in Party pomp and ceremony. Through it all, Konstantin plays the piano with transporting passion. The instrument is both his refuge and the thing tethering him to a world he cannot abide—and, if he can avoid getting kicked out of school, it could also be his chance to escape the totalitarian regime. Increasingly desperate and reckless, Konstantin struggles toward adulthood in a society where expression of any kind can come at terrible cost.

     Like Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Safran Foer, Nikolai Grozni—himself a native of Bulgaria who was a world-class pianist in his youth—sets an electrifying portrait of youthful longing and anxiety against a backdrop of tumultuous, historic world events. Hypnotic and headlong, Wunderkind’s brilliant marriage of eloquent adolescent turmoil and rage over government and social oppression makes for a newly urgent portrait of the bleak Soviet landscape of fear, surveillance, and scarcity.

“Wunderkind is a gift for all the senses. Nikolai Grozni’s shimmering, visceral prose unfurls like music, as if a baby grand served as his infernal typewriter.”

—Patti Smith, bestselling author of Just Kids

“With heartbreaking insight, Wunderkind portrays the searing brutalities of life in Communist Eastern Europe—and the power of music to provide solace and redemption. I found myself astonished, amazed, and moved by this remarkable novel.” 

—Lauren Belfer, bestselling author of City of Light and A Fierce Radiance

“Nikolai Grozni’s Wunderkind is an elegant, graceful novel that captures not only the power and beauty of music, but the stifling oppression of life in a totalitarian state.  The novel sings and howls, and in its finest moments, takes the reader’s breath away.”

—Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“Shrewd, rhapsodic, Nikolai Grozni’s Wunderkind fuses high romanticism with sinister, hard-edged humor.  A love-hate letter to a Bulgaria that no longer exists, it contains some of the most vivid, celebratory writing about music I’ve ever read.”

—Zachary Lazar, author of Sway

“In this fine portrait of a suffocating society, what are especially remarkable is the vitality—Konstantin is a rebel with a cause, his anger contagious—and the way Grozni writes about music. Rapturous and insightful . . . passages [are] a real adrenaline rush. . . . [T]his passionate novel should be pushed on anyone interested in music, politics, or energized coming-of-age tales.”

—Library Journal

“Grozni's writing is colorful and strong.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Wunderkind is a gift for all the senses. Nikolai Grozni’s shimmering, visceral prose unfurls like music, as if a baby grand served as his infernal typewriter.”

—Patti Smith, bestselling author of Just Kids

Fifteen-year-old Konstantin is a brash, brilliant pianist of exceptional sensitivity in the bleak and controlled environment of Sofia, Bulgaria, in the 1980s, struggling toward adulthood in a society where honest expression often comes at a terrible cost. Confined to the militaristic Music School for the Gifted for most of each day and a good part of the night, Konstantin exults in his small rebellions—smoking, drinking, and mocking Party pomp and cant at every opportunity. Through it all, Konstantin plays the piano with inflamed passion, transported by unparalleled explorations of Chopin, Debussy, and Bach, even as he is cursed by his teachers’ numbing efforts at mind control. Hypnotic and headlong, Wunderkind’s dazzling portrait of youthful turmoil gives us a stunningly urgent, exquisitely observed, and wonderfully tragicomic glimpse behind the Iron Curtain at the very end of the Cold War while reminding us of the sometimes life-saving grace of great music.

Nikolai Grozni began training as a classical pianist at age four, and won his first major award in Salerno, Italy, at the age of ten. Grozni's acclaimed memoir Turtle Feet follows his four years spent as a Buddhist monk studying at the Institute of Tibetan Dialectics in Dharamsala, and later at a monastery in South India. Grozni holds an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. He lives with his wife and their children in France.