5 plus stars

Our story starts out in Czechoslovakia just after the ending of WWI. A little girl named Otylie is told by her father that there is music in war. He describes even the various types of military music, including the music that accompanies the start and finish of a battle. The young girl ponders this and decides she doesn’t want this haunting her. He leaves her a three part musical score. For Otylie this is the only thing that remains of her father.

It is now the late 1939 and Czechoslovakia is invaded by the Germans. Otylie knows she must guard the sonata from the avaricious Germans. They are destroying everything in their path – buildings, businesses and people. Neighbors are telling on neighbors in order to curry favor and to survive. Otylie gives one-third of the score to her friend Irene and cautions her to guard it with her life. She hopes that by splitting it up, the Germans won’t know what she has or think that it is of any value. The other third she gets to her H\husband, Jakob. Jakob is on the run from the Nazis.

During the present day a part of an unattributed manuscript is given to Meta Tavener. She is a woman whose piano career was cut short be a devastating injury to her hand. The musical score appears to be authentic. It appears to have been written in the 18th Century. She meets Irena Svobodova Dorfman an elderly and very ill lady who has one-third of the musical score. She pleads with Meta to see if she can learn find the real owner and the other two parts of the score.

Meta travels to the former Czechoslovakia to see if she can locate the woman who Irena in New York hasn’t seen since WWII.

What follows is a remarkable story of discovery. Meta also learns that she is not the only one looking for answers about the script. The story moves back and forth through time in a beautiful yet compelling manner. We learn interesting background information about several well-known characters that played a part in WWII.

This story is beautifully written and plotted. It is exciting and absorbing. It tells the story of love, loss and the vagaries of the human heart. The research that went into this book is exhaustive. This is my first Bradford Morrow novel, but I will certainly be looking into other ones he has written. I truly loved it. My only problem with the book was that the transitions were difficult to follow. The story jumped from present to past with barely a paragraph break. Hopefully, this is resolved before final publication. The musical references were a little disconcerting because I did not know them, but no distraction at all from the story.

I want to thank Netgalley and Grove Atlantic/Atlantic Monthly Press for forwarding to me a copy of this remarkable book to read.