As Edgar embarks on his first trip abroad, the beauty and mystery of Burma, its entrancing landscape, its customs and music, and an exotic woman named Khin Myo cast a spell that he cannot resist. Such eccentric behavior causes the major to be regarded by some as a genius and by others as a suspicious renegade, but, as Edgar soon realizes, his actions may conceal even stranger truths. He has demanded that a grand piano be hauled through the jungle and now requires a tuner to be sent to him as well. Surgeon-Major Anthony Carroll has established an important foothold in Mae Lwin, employing unconventional methods-reciting poetry and playing music-to negotiate treaties with Burmese opponents of British rule.
The year is 1886, and the British Empire is attempting to tighten its control of its colonies in the Far East, to fend off French rivals in the Mekong Delta, and to quell the resistance of a confederacy of local Shan tribes in northern Burma. When Edgar Drake is summoned to the British War Office and asked to tune an eccentric major’s 1840 Erard grand piano in the jungles of Burma, he is both confused and intrigued. Sensuous, lyrical, rich with passion and adventure, this is a hypnotic tale of myth, romance, and self-discovery: an unforgettable novel. 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. 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.
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. 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 Tuner by Daniel Mason An extraordinary first novel that tells the story of a British piano tuner sent deep into Burma in the nineteenth century.
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