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About the Book

About the Book

The Piano Teacher

This cinematic tale of two love affairs in mid-century Hong Kong shows colonial pretensions tainted by wartime truths. Will Truesdale, a rootless, handsome Briton, arrives in the colony in 1941, and is swept up by Trudy Liang, the blithe and glamorous daughter of a Shanghai millionaire and a Portuguese beauty. They quickly become inseparable, their days spent in a whirl of parties and champagne, but when the Japanese invade, Will is interned and Trudy resorts to increasingly Faustian methods to survive.

After the war, Claire Pendleton, the native wife of a British civil servant, arrives. She begins giving piano lessons to the daughter of a rich Chinese couple, and falls in love with their wounded and inscrutable driver: Will. Lee unfolds each story, and flits between them, with the brisk grace and discretion of the society she describes a world in which horrors are adumbrated but seldom told.

Lee’s rich debut is a love story unfolding across generations and cultures against the backdrop of one of the more perilous times in recent world history. As the threads of this spellbinding novel intertwine and converge, a landscape of impossible choices emerges—between love and safety, courage and survival, the present and, above all, the past.

THE PIANO TEACHER © Copyright 2011 by Janice Y.K. Lee. Reprinted with permission by Penguin. All rights reserved.

The Piano Teacher
by Janice Y. K. Lee

  • Publication Date: November 17, 2009
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Paperback: 328 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Books
  • ISBN-10: 0143116533
  • ISBN-13: 9780143116530