★2020 Taiwan Literature Golden Book Award
★2020 Openbook Book of the Year Award
★2020 Kingstone Bookstore's Top 10 Influential Books of the Year
★2020 Books.com.tw Book of the Year and one of Top 100 Bestseller
★2021 First Prize, Novel Award for Taipei International Book Fair
★2021 United Daily Literature Award
★2021 Taipei International Book Exhibition Prize
★2021 Selected by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture as a “Books from Taiwan”
★Dr. David Der-Wei Wang praised: “THE PIANO TUNER is Chiang-Sheng Kuo’s best work and one of the best Taiwanese novels in recent years.”
★Shelf Awareness in the USA, Best Book of Week (Fiction)
★Rights sold: American Audio, Albania, Brazil, China, Ethiopia/Amharic, France, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Poland, Serbia, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, USA and Ukraine

“In the beginning, we were souls without bodies.”
When God uses music to give us souls a physical shape, souls lost freedom forever.

This bestseller and winner of every major literary award in Taiwan is an elegiac novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate hearts—and music: "A delightful read."—Ha Jin

A widower grieving for his young wife. A piano tuner concealing a lifetime of secrets. An out-of-tune Steinway piano. A journey of self-discovery across time and continents, from a dark apartment in Taipei’s red-light district to snow-clad New York.

At the heart of the story is the nameless narrator, the piano tuner. In his forties, he is balding and ugly, a loser by any standard. But he was once a musical prodigy. What betrayal and what heartbreak made him walk away from greatness?

Long hailed in Taiwan as a “writer’s writer,” Chiang-Sheng Kuo delivers a stunningly powerful, compact novel in The Piano Tuner. It’s a book of sounds: both of music and of the heart, from Rachmaninoff to Schubert, from Glenn Gould to Sviatoslav Richter, from untapped potential to unrequited love. With a cadence and precision that bring to mind Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, this short novel may be a portrait of the artist as a “failure,” but it also describes a pursuit of the ultimate beauty in music and in love.

Chiang-Sheng Kuo (郭強生) is long hailed as “a writer’s writer” and one of the most exciting storytellers and prose stylists in Taiwanese literature today. He has written a number of novels, essay collections, and dramatic scripts, of which The Piano Tuner is the first to be published in English and has been licensed in 19 territories. The Piano Tuner was a bestseller and swept every major literary award in Taiwan, including the 2021 United Daily Literature Award, 2020 Taiwan Literature Golden Award, and 2020 Openbook Book of the Year Award as well as other honors. Chiang-Sheng Kuo earned a PhD in drama from New York University and teaches in the Department of Language and Creative Writing at National Taipei University of Education. He lives in Taipei.

About the Translator

Howard Goldblatt translates Chinese fiction from China and Taiwan, including Nobel Prize–winner Mo Yan, five of whose works are published by Arcade (The Garlic Ballads; The Republic of Wine; Big Breasts and Wide Hips; Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out; Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh). He has also translated works by Chiang-Sheng Kuo (The Piano Tuner) and Liu Zhenyun (I Did Not Kill My Husband; The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon; Remembering 1942, all with Sylvia Li-Chun Lin and published by Arcade). He taught Chinese literature and culture for more than a quarter of a century. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.

Sylvia Li-Chun Lin, a former teacher and scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, is a full-time translator and writer. She and Howard Goldblatt live in Lafayette, Colorado, with their demonic cat, Domino.

"An elegant novel, told with restraint and acute perceptions. A delightful read."—Ha Jin

"So much is packed into this compact and surprising novel: a complex story of genius, madness, and thwarted desire and, beyond that, a deep exploration of the tension between craft and the pursuit of fame. The Piano Tuner is about more than music—it’s about the choices one makes in becoming an artist."—Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island

"The Piano Tuner is as meticulous in its excavation of loneliness as it is in its exploration of music. I was completely pulled into the narrative as it peeled back layer after layer, exposing the interiority and secrets of the beguiling piano tuner. This book is a quiet masterpiece."—Dur e Aziz Amna, author of American Fever


"Chiang-Sheng Kuo’s novel The Piano Tuner explores the accord and dissonance between sounds and souls through language. . . . The mood of love transcends the language barrier like music, for the emotional atmosphere of the book is infused with hybrid aesthetics that invoke this sentiment."──Asymptote