Fictional Novels about Pianists
If you’re looking for a book in which the main character is a piano player, a piano student or a historical pianist, you’ve come to the right place. For a bumper list of piano novels, visit our online bookshop at Bookshop.org.
Deborah Levy, published in 2023 by Penguin Books
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At the height of her career, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson - former child prodigy, now in her 30s - walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance. Now she is in Athens, watching as another young woman, a stranger but uncannily familiar - almost her double - purchases a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.
So begins a journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who bought the dancing horses. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, August Blue uncovers the ways in which we seek to lose an old story, find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.
An Yu, published in 2022 by Vintage Publishing
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A gorgeous Beijing-set novel of music, secrets and self-discovery
For three years, Song Yan has filled the emptiness of her Beijing apartment with the tentative notes of her young piano students. With her marriage, she gave up on her own career as a concert pianist, but her husband Bowen has long rebuffed her desire to have a child.
Instead, she must accommodate her mother-in-law, newly arrived from the province of Yunnan and bringing with her long-buried family secrets. Soon strange parcels start to show up on the doorstep and Song Yan's dreams become troubling and claustrophobic. Striking out alone through the winter city, she finds herself pulled into the ancient hutongs to confront the source of her unease.
In a silent room within a timeless house, can she find the notes she needs to make sense of all the pain and beauty in her life?
Joe Meno, published in 2022 by Akashic Books
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Aleksandar and Isobel are siblings and former classical music prodigies, once destined for greatness. Now in their 20s, they find themselves encountering ridiculous jobs, unfulfilling romantic relationships, and the outrageousness of ordinary life. Doomed by fate, a family history of failure, an odd mother, and an absent father, the two siblings have all but given up.
But when an illness forces Isobel to move back into the family home, Aleks becomes deeply involved in the endless challenges that surround his relatives. Once Isobel begins playing cello again, Aleks comes to see a world of possibility and wonder in the lives of his extraordinarily complicated family.
This entertaining novel asks: is it ever truly possible to separate our fates from those we’ve come to love?
Ian McEwan, published in 2022 by Vintage
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When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, 11-year-old Roland's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
Now, when his wife vanishes, leaving him alone with his tiny son, Roland is forced to confront the reality of his restless existence. As the radiation from Chernobyl spreads across Europe, he begins a search for answers that looks deep into his family history and will last for the rest of his life.
Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means. His journey raises important questions: can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape our lives and our memories? And what can we really learn from the traumas of the past?
Rose Tremain, published in 2016 by Chatto & Windus
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What is the difference between friendship and love? Or between neutrality and commitment? Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in 'neutral' Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem a distant echo. But Gustav's father has mysteriously died, and his adored mother Emilie is strangely cold and indifferent to him. Gustav's childhood is spent in lonely isolation, his only toy a tin train with painted passengers staring blankly from the carriage windows.
As time goes on, an intense friendship with a boy of his own age, Anton Zwiebel, begins to define Gustav's life. Jewish and mercurial, a talented pianist tortured by nerves when he has to play in public, Anton fails to understand how deeply and irrevocably his life and Gustav's are entwined.
Fierce, astringent, profoundly tender, Rose Tremain’s beautifully orchestrated novel asks the question, what does it do to a person, or to a country, to pursue an eternal quest for neutrality, and self-mastery, while all life's hopes and passions continually press upon the borders and beat upon the gate.
André Aciman, published in 2019 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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The LSO has just posted its first TikTok in April 2023, with an introduction from Simon Rattle. In the pipeline are some ASMR videos, how to videos on instrument upkeep, and tips from players about practising, being on stage and dealing with nerves.
Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 1995 by Faber and Faber
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Ryder, a renowned pianist, arrives in a Central European city he cannot identify for a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. But then as he traverses a landscape by turns eerie and comical – and always strangely malleable, as a dream might be - he comes steadily to realise he is facing the most crucial performance of his life.
Ishiguro's extraordinary and original study of a man whose life has accelerated beyond his control was met on publication by consternation, vilification – and the highest praise.
Lea Singer, published in 2020 by New Vessel Press
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The Piano Student centres on an affair between one of the 20th century's most celebrated pianists, Vladimir Horowitz, and his young male student, Nico Kaufmann, in the late 1930s. As Europe hurtles toward political catastrophe and Horowitz ascends to the pinnacle of artistic achievement, the great pianist must hide his illicit love from his wife Wanda, daughter of renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini.
The affair is narrated by Kaufmann in the 1980s to another music devotee who awakens memories of the thwarted relationship. Kaufmann is spending his final years playing in small-time Zurich bars, never rivalling his teachers mastery and rapturously received concerts.
Based on unpublished letters by Horowitz to Kaufmann that author Lea Singer discovered in Switzerland, the book portrays the anguish that the acclaimed musician felt about his never publicly acknowledged homosexuality and the attendant duplicity of his personal life. It's a riveting and sensitive novel about musical perfection, love, and longing denied, with multiple historical layers and insights into artistic creativity.
Hannah Fiddy is a creative entrepreneur, developing new audiences for classical music. She has created and promoted numerous concerts outside of traditional spaces, including warehouses, pubs, clubs, museums, hospitals, prisons and even in Primark. Hannah is also an interviewer, writer and guest lecturer, and runs the Avon Chamber Choir in Bristol. In a past life she founded London Flashmob, producing quirky events from wedding proposals to cultural pranks for up to 1,000 people.
Follow Hannah on Twitter @Hannah_Fiddy.