The Piano Tuner

A Novel

By: Daniel Mason

Narrated by: Richard Matthews

Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins

Publisher's summary

An extraordinary first novel that tells the story of a British piano tuner sent deep into Burma in the 19th century.

In October 1886, Edgar Drake receives a strange request from the British War Office: he must leave his wife and his quiet life in London to travel to the jungles of Burma, where a rare Erard grand piano is in need of repair. The piano belongs to an army surgeon-major whose unorthodox peacemaking methods - poetry, medicine, and now music - have brought a tentative quiet to the southern Shan States but have elicited questions from his superiors.

On his journey through Europe, the Red Sea, India, and into Burma, Edgar meets soldiers, mystics, bandits, and tale-spinners, as well as an enchanting woman as elusive as the surgeon-major. And at the doctor’s fort on a remote Burmese river, Edgar encounters a world more mysterious and dangerous than he ever could have imagined.

Sensuous, lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, this is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance, and self-discovery: an unforgettable novel.

©2002 Daniel Mason (P)2002 Books on Tape, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Richly imagined, The Piano Tuner winds like a lazy river, carrying the reader into the mythic land of Kipling and Conrad." (People)

"A novel for readers of literary and popular fiction alike; highly recommended." (Library Journal)

"Richard Matthews delivers an astonishing performance. His characters are as meticulously crafted as Burmese-carved ivory miniatures.... The dialogue soars. Mason’s plot fascinates and surprises, while Matthews’s performance is a tour de force." (AudioFile)

Fantasy and History

The background information about the British presence in the far east was very interesting and informative. The plot is very unbelievable, but the action of the story carries the listener along.

This is a good one

After first finishing this book I thought it pretty good. That was early in my Audible / audio book experience. Now that I've listened to a number of others I find myself reflecting on The Piano Tuner and realize how good it is. Descriptive writing and very good narration combined with a unique period story add up to a very good audio book. I recommend this one.

Wonderful book

This is one of the best books I've listened to yet. The author's prose flows richly describing the events seemlessly into the plot. My only regret is that I was not able to sit quietly and take in every word but instead listened to it on my daily commute to work and back. Although some reviewers didn't care for the narrator, I thought he was very good and easy to take. My only critique of this wonderful book is the ending but that is only the last few minutes. I'll be waiting for this author's next one...

Uneven Story

I found “The Piano Tuner” to be one of those frustrating books that start with great promise. Interesting characters, good plot potential, but begins to wander around about 3/4 of the way through. Then it seems the author couldn’t decide whether to bring the story back on track or just end it quickly, out of ideas. Unfortunately, the author quit on us readers and wrote a miserably predictable ending.

The absolute best in reading, a true classic!

I firmly believe that this young author's very first novel is, amazingly, one of the finest books that I have read in my fifty odd years of reading. It is already a best seller, and I am sure that,.. two hundred years hense, it will have become one of the first true classic works of our twenty-first century!
Be sure to read this unabridged rendering, as there is just too much to miss of this enchanting story!
If you are a musican, historian, beggerman, ...anything..leap into the wonderous debths of this majestic work!

kinda of slow and not credible

I did not have any problem with the narrator, He seemed just fine to me.

As for the book itself, perhaps I just do not fully get the point. There does seem to be a lot of symbolism floating around. There is some good writing, and the writer is pretty good at describing scenes and the like, but there is too much discussion of landscape and the like. Also, sometimes there seems to be just too many words. It seemed sort of original in sections, although very much like an inverse Heart of Darkness. At other times it seemed like a shifting mix of adventure story, existential tome, and magical realism.

Bottomline, it was worth reading, but I sure do not think it is a great novel. For those that think it is a great book, what exactly is the great teaching here? And what is the ending supposed to mean, or teach us or whatever? Other than that the author had to wrap it up somehow.

A delicacy

Learning about the "man of the one story" made my month. This is a special book. Graphically granular. Amazingly refreshing and soothing for a world grappling with a pandemic.

A Wealth of Wonder

This was.a book for listening. A strange country, a turbulent time in its history and the call of a piano to a man so out of.place and time - all made more believable by a reader who made us believe he was there.

Superlative novel ruined by a terrible narrator

I don't need to write much about the novel itself, the other reviewers have all done it justice. It is brilliantly written and wonderfully interwoven, full of fascinating characters and information, given authenticity by the fact that the author knows the places he is writing about and has taken the trouble to really do his homework on the history and technical information involved.

The problem is that the narrator is simply an amateur who is not even remotely up to the task of presenting this brilliant work. It sounds as though someone had been picked off the street in London at random and then recorded the book without any direction or correction. The reader only really has one voice -- uptight and strained -- and each attempt at a character's voice is worse than the last. A male character introduced as having a "stentorian baritone" speaks in a tortured and hoarse falsetto, all women sound like demented spinsters of at least seventy who are also suffering from croup, and the less said about the narrator's pitifully painful attempts at foreign accents the better. After the second chapter I found myself beginning to flinch whenever a new character was introduced, because I knew that in a moment I would be subjected to new depths of abominable dialect and miserable characterisation, and I was never disappointed.

If it were possible I would give the book eight stars and the narration zero or less than zero. Since this isn't possible I've decided to award the maximum possible rating because the book itself deserves it. Even so, I feel cheated because the abysmally bad narration almost completely ruined the experience of this wonderful book -- it is a tribute to the book's brilliance and power that I actually managed to listen through to the end. I am certainly going to make a note of this narrator's name and will never ever buy a book narrated by him again.

Unforgettable

The reader is immediately drawn into the protagonist's world and cannot escape. Unforgettable and disturbing reality. We have all had a 'piano tuner' experience at one time in our lives. Very well read.