Chris Cander Ordine dei libri

A gripping novel about friendship, secrets, misjudgments, and redemption among women by the USA Today bestselling author of The Weight of a Piano. Martha Hale is an affable wife and mother who lives in an affluent neighborhood of well-tended lawns and high expectations. If only her clumsiness at penetrating the social circles of her neighbors weren't making Martha so lonely. That's why she's thrilled when the glamorous Minnie Foster, a former high school classmate, moves in next door. Despite Martha's determination, picking up where they left off is trickier than anticipated--especially when their memories of the past don't always align. But Martha is undeterred. In fact, her preoccupation with Minnie's life, her success, and her marriage is becoming an obsession. When she sees a darkness and shame hiding inside Minnie's perfectly deceptive home, Martha realizes that not even Minnie's secrets are what they seem. Visceral, sharp-witted, and deeply empathetic, A Gracious Neighbor explores the judgments women pass on one another and the ills of a society curated to keep them on the outside looking in.

For fans of Ann Patchett's Bel Canto , Amanda Coplin's The Orchardist , and Annie Proulx's Accordian Crimes . A tour-de-force about two women and the piano that inexorably ties their lives together through time and across continents, for better and for worse . In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life: a Blüthner piano, built at the turn of the century in Germany, on which she discovers everything that she herself can do with music and what music, in turn, does for her. Yet after marrying, she emigrates with her young family from Russia to America, at her husband's frantic insistence, and her piano is lost in the shuffle. In 2012, in Bakersfield, California, twenty-six-year-old Clara Lundy loses another boyfriend and again has to find a new apartment, which is complicated by the gift her father had given her for her twelfth birthday, shortly before he and her mother died in a fire that burned their house down: a Blüthner upright she has never learned to play. Ophaned, she was raised by her aunt and uncle, who in his car-repair shop trained her to become a first-rate mechanic, much to the surprise of her subsequent customers. But this work, her true mainstay in a scattered life, is put on hold when her hand gets broken while the piano's being moved--and in sudden frustration she chooses to sell it. And what becomes crucial is who the most interested party turns out to be. The mysterious--and tragic--connections between Katya, Clara, and this Blüthner unravel gradually yet thrillingly in Chris Cander's stunning portrait of modern womanhood and powerful ode to music's ability to sustain us or, in its absence, destroy us. A novel about attraction, obsession, creative passion, love, and loss, The Weight of a Piano is a dazzling exploration of how the human heart can both break and be restored.