Thirty-five years after publication of her first novel, The Dorp (followed by other works on cooking and gardening), Frieda Arkin returns to the world of fiction to give us another darkly humorous novel, Hedwig and Berti. Hedwig and Berti is a saga of the totally unlikely marriage of a grandly Teutonic woman, Hedwig Kessler, and her diminutive cousin Berti, two upper-class German Jews forced to leave their homeland during the rise of the Nazis. They...

"A novel by the author of The Man Who Saw Everything about wayward selves, femininities, sexualities, avatars, alter egos, and the twin poles of compassion and cruelty that exist within all of us"-- At the height of her career, piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance. Now she is in Athens, watching a woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses in at flea market. Elsa wants the horses, too, but there are...

"Musician Natalie Curtis is broken by strict training and a lost love. After encountering Native American music, she is determined to save these ancient songs which are being silenced by the government. In doing so, Natalie steps inside the space between the notes to discover something she'd forgotten-music powerful enough to heal. Based on a true story"--

"It's 1933 in pre-war London. Identical twin sisters Clara and Olivia Marionetta are rehearsing for their performance in the ballet Coppélia at the recently opened Sadler's Wells Theatre. Disciplined and dedicated, Olivia is the perfect ballerina - but no matter how hard she tries, she can't compete with Clara's rebellious charm. And now Clara has started a relationship with someone who Olivia secretly desires: passionate, bohemian Nathan, a pianist...

"When a young boy begins to play on his family's piano, reveling in the fun of plunking the keys, his father signs him up for lessons so that he can learn to play properly. With his father's encouragement, Raj learns notes, then scales, then songs, and finally classical pieces that his father can recognize and be proud of. But the more Raj practices and the more skilled he becomes, the less he enjoys playing, until he grows up and stops playing altogether....

"San Francisco. Winter 1881-82. All pianist Inez Stannert wants for Christmas is for the struggling music store she owns in San Francisco to be a success. When diva Theia Carrington Drake asks Inez to be her accompanist for several high-profile personal appearances, Inez is thrilled. This is the chance she was waiting for -- a way to make some extra money and bring her store into the limelight of the city's polite society to enhance her business....

"A fact-based historical novel, as compelling as Nancy Horan's New York Times bestseller, Loving Frank, set primarily in New York City in the 1920s and '30s and inspired by the decade-long relationship between the celebrated composer George Gershwin and Kay Swift, who was both his romantic partner and a gifted musician in her own right"-- 1924. Katharine "Kay" Swift, restless but loyal society wife of wealthy banker James Warburg and a serious pianist...

Gifted fifteen-year-old Francisco Guzman has become an internationally renowned concert pianist, touring the world under the auspices of his music conservatory. That gives his mother, Posadas County Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman, plenty of reason to worry -- and that's magnified when she learns that he's in Mexico's crime-ridden Mazatlan for a concert series where he may be the target for scam artists and kidnappers. Estelle's worries go from...