I am very excited to send you critically acclaimed novelist BRADFORD MORROW’sTHE PRAGUE SONATA (Atlantic Monthly Press, $26, October 2017). Morrow has been praised as “a fine writer with an extraordinary feel for the physicality of fiction” (Boston Globe) and “one of America’s major literary voices” (Publishers Weekly), and his latest was one of our most lauded mysteries of the year: THE FORGERS was named an Amazon Top 100 Book of the Year, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, an Indie Next pick, a LibraryReads Selection for November, and a Library Journal Editors’ Pick. Morrow, recipient of the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and winner of O. Henry and Pushcart prizes for his short fiction, received a Guggenheim Fellowship to research and write his new book, THE PRAGUE SONATA. Morrow’s magnum opus, over ten years in the making, THE PRAGUE SONATA is a literary quest novel that travels from Nazi-occupied Prague to turn-of-the-millennium New York as a young musicologist seeks to reunite the lost pages of a mysterious sonata manuscript.

In the early days of the new millennium, worn and weathered pages of an original, partial sonata score—the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens—come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. To Meta’s eye, it appears to be an authentic eighteenth-century manuscript; to her discerning ear, the music rendered there is commanding, hauntingly beautiful, clearly the work of a master. But there is no indication of who the composer might be. The gift comes with the caveat that Meta attempt to find the manuscript’s true owner—a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since the Second World War forced them apart—and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of Dvořák and Kafka, Meta sets out on an unforgettable search to locate the remaining movements of the sonata and uncover a story that has influenced the course of many lives, even as it becomes clear that she isn’t the only one after the music’s secrets.

Magisterially evoking decades of Prague’s tragic and triumphant history, from the First World War through the soaring days of the Velvet Revolution, and moving from postwar London to the heartland of immigrant America, THE PRAGUE SONATA is both epic and intimate, evoking the ways in which individual notes of love and sacrifice become part of the celebratory symphony of life.

 

BRADFORD MORROW is the author of the novels Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch (PEN/Faulkner Award finalist), Trinity Fields (Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist), Giovanni’s Gift, Ariel’s Crossing, and The Diviner’s Tale, and most recently, The Forgers; a short story collection, The Uninnocent; severalcollections of poetry; and a children’s book. He is the founding editor ofConjunctions and has contributed to many anthologies and journals. A Bard Center Fellow and professor of literature at Bard College, he lives in New York City.

Rights to The Forgers were sold to Xinhua Publishing House (China), Euromedia (Czech), Editions du Seuil (France), Insel (Germany), Astarti (Greece), and Tokyo Sogensha (Japan).