Product Description: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work...read more

Is there anything sweeter than first love?Don't ask Claire Keyes. The twenty-eight-year-old piano prodigy has never had a regular boyfriend, much less a real romance. Her music career has left little room for friends or family—which is just part of the reason she hasn't seen the family bakery or her two sisters in years.But now Nicole is sick, and Jesse is AWOL. Despite the fact that Claire can't boil water, she's determined to play caretaker. Connecting with her sisters tops her to-do list…along with falling in love, or at least in lust, for the first time.Ruggedly sexy Wyatt just might fit the bill. Although he keeps saying that he and Claire come from entirely different worlds, he lights up hotter than a bakery oven whenever Claire is near. If this keeps up, she just might sweet—talk him into her bed…and her life.

In his much celebrated debut novel, The Drowning People, Richard Mason (“An Oxonian literary sensation” —The New York Times Book Review) wrote with wisdom and mastery well beyond his twenty-one years—about love, betrayal, and revenge, and about the particular ritualized world of the English upper class.Now in his dazzling new novel Mason writes about mothers and daughters; aging and death; memory and longing; history and narrative; and about the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life.The setting is London. The time is the present.Mother and daughter are choosing an assisted-living facility and have come to The Albany, a late-nineteenth-century Victorian mansion, the flagship property of the TranquilAge™ chain of nursing homes.The mother, Joan—eighty years old, a gifted amateur pianist denied the pleasures of performance by arthritic hands—has recently been experiencing a rich inner world that she hides from her daughter, a world gained access through the (seemingly magic) pedals of her piano: a portal to adventure. She dreads the prospect of leaving her apartment, but her daughter has decided that she can no longer live on her own.The daughter, Eloise—forty-eight, a hedge fund manager, two decades in commodities—long ago rejected the possibilities of motherhood and has lived enviably free of responsibility.At her pressure-cooker job, Eloise has bought up $130 million (a quarter of the hedge fund’s money) of osmium reserves—a transition metal—based on a casual remark by her former lover, a French metallurgist, a genius of sorts, with whom she lived and whom she almost married in Paris in the 1980s.He’s been working for years on the development of the compound, which will be tougher than diamonds for industrial use and is only months away from trials. If successful, it could more than double the value of the fund Eloise manages.While mother and daughter are on the trip-of-a-lifetime to the South African capital of the old Orange Free State, the city of Joan’s girlhood, Eloise gets a frantic phone call. The price of osmium is in free fall; the fund is off-loading. . . Fighting panic with a coherent strategy, Eloise puts in motion a bold gamble that risks all—her future, the fund, her mother’s well-being.As the stories of mother and daughter intersect, each in a race against time—Joan struggling to live in the present (she cannot believe her days will end in an institution); her daughter racing at breakneck speed toward the precipice of disaster—the novel rushes to its stunning conclusion.

Product Description: For two years, Julian Forrester's been playing keyboards and piano for Conquest. Having left behind a classical career, he's reached a level of fame like he's never dreamed. But fame and fortune can't bring him the one thing he wants most; love...read more

This opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe's belle époque, is about a young man -- Piet Barol -- with an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. Piet applies for a job as tutor to the troubled son of Europe's leading hotelier: a child who refuses to leave his family's mansion on Amsterdam's grandest canal. As the young man enters this glittering world, he learns it secrets -- and soon finds his life transformed.

Product Description: How can you choose which dream to follow? Newlyweds Amelia and Marcus are recent college graduates, working hard to stay afloat in Los Angeles while they search for their dream jobs. Marcus, with an MDiv, seeks a pastoral position at a large multicultural city church Amelia has a music degree and hopes to play piano professionally...read more

Product Description: Life in Sofia, Bulgaria, in the late 1980s is bleak and controlled. The oppressive Communist regime bears down on all aspects of people’s lives much like the granite sky overhead. In the crumbling old building that hosts the Sofia Music School for the Gifted, inflexible and unsentimental apparatchiks drill the students like soldiers—as if the music they are teaching did not have the power to set these young souls on fire...read more

Product Description: Now in paperback, “Wunderkind is a gift for all the senses. Nikolai Grozni’s shimmering, visual, and visceral prose unfurls like music, as if a baby grand served as his infernal typewriter” (Patti Smith).Fifteen-year-old Konstantin is a brash, brilliant pianist of exceptional sensitivity in the bleak and controlled environment of Sofia, Bulgaria, in the 1980s, struggling toward adulthood in a society where honest expression often comes at a terrible cost...read more

Product Description: A true story from one of America's most beloved composers Marvin loves to play the piano and compose his own songs. But performing music over and over that's composed by some old guys name Ludwig and Wolfgang just gives him knots in his stomach...read more

Piano player and Polish émigré Jerzy Wozzack brought his family to Paris to escape Communist rule and discover new opportunities for prosperity and freedom. But now they’re scrounging along the edge of poverty, stuck in an unwelcoming city that drains Jerzy’s self-respect and cultural identity. Hope shines bright, though, when a fellow émigré offers him an in on a high-paying job delivering anonymous packages to anonymous recipients. Jerzy leaps at the chance and quickly finds himself flush with cash ― but snared in the drug-smuggling schemes of a sadistic crime lord and his seductive assistant. Even as Jerzy struggles to break free from their clutches, the heady whirl of sex, drugs, and riches sucks him deeper into Paris’s debauched underworld, where a massive turf war is brewing and the only escape is death.

Lucy Beck-Moreau once had a promising future as a concert pianist. She performed at festivals and won awards; all the right people knew who she was. That was all before she turned twelve. Now, aged sixteen, it's over for her. Sara Zarr deftly draws readers into the glamorous and high-pressure world of top-level music competitions and complicated family dynamics in this moving and eloquent coming-of-age story.

Life doesn't follow rulesJazz pianist Dez Batiste knows this all too well. It's taken him years to return to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina swept away what mattered most. His musician's soul is still lost in the wreckage, but he's after a brand-new future by opening an Uptown jazz club. Too bad the distractingly sexy Eleanor Theriot is getting in his way. Sure, she may be protecting her community, but there's passion underneath that upper-class exterior of hers.With a little seduction from Dez, that passion sizzles to life and soon they're enjoying an exclusive friends-with-benefits arrangement. The intensity between them reawakens his music and Dez knows they're more than temporary. Now to convince Eleanor to bend those rules she lives by…

Product Description: Two-Part Inventions begins when Suzanne, a concert pianist, dies suddenly of a stroke in the New York City apartment she shares with her producer husband Philip. Rather than mourn in peace, Philip becomes deeply paranoid: their life is based on a fraud and the acclaimed music the couple created is about to be exposed...read more

On the top floor of a small desert hospital, an unlikely piano prodigy lies in a coma, attended to by his gruff, helpless father. Outside the clinic, a motley vigil assembles beneath a reluctant New Mexico winter—all watched by a disconsolate wolf on his nightly rounds. To some the boy is a novelty, to others a religion. And above them, a would-be angel sits captive in a holding cell of the afterlife, finishing the work he began on Earth, writing the songs that could free him.A Million Heavens brings John Brandon’s deadpan humor and hard-won empathy to a new realm of gritty surrealism—a surprising and exciting turn from one of the best young novelists of our time.

Dear Listener: False Pretenses was not only my first contemporary suspense novel, but was also my first hardcover, published in October 1988. It came out the following May in paperback. Meet Elizabeth Carleton, a fascinating woman who is not only a famous concert pianist, but is also married to a wealthy international business tycoon, Timothy Carleton. She is the envy of all until her perfect life falls apart literally in a heartbeat: Timothy Carleton is stabbed in the chest with an ice pick and Elizabeth is accused of his murder. Things rapidly go from bad to worse until a surprise witness appears to give her an airtight alibi. The jury finds her not guilty. The only thing is: She’s never met the man who testified on her behalf. What does he want? There is also her late husband’s family, who are out to destroy her. On top of everything else, Elizabeth is expected to take over the financial empire her husband left behind. Then three men suddenly appear in her life. Can she trust any of them? Or is one of them a murderer? I hope this story will have you turning each dark corner with Elizabeth to see who’s there to do her in. Let me know what you think. Catherine Coulter

Product Description: A ripped-from-the-headlines story about teens and steroids.From a New York Times bestselling sports writer comes the story of one boy's quest to stay true to himself without letting down his team. Jack and his father have never seen eye to eye…until Jack’s dad gives him the chance to transfer to Oakhurst his junior year...read more

Product Description: Heading west for the serene deserts of New Mexico with his three-legged dog, Patch, Abe Freeman hopes to escape the memories of his girlfriend’s lost battle with cancer. He expects his cross-country journey to be healing, not life-threatening...read more

Product Description: 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...read more