“A captivating family portrait with an enigmatic piano prodigy at its center, Bruce Berger’s THE MUSIC STALKER sings. In arresting prose, Berger offers searing meditations on music and mental health, spirituality and Jewish identity, passion and anguish and fear—leaving the reader gasping for breath.”

--Patricia Park, author of Re Jane

“What drives the characters of The Music Stalker to their highs and lows, their togetherness and their times apart, is also what artfully holds them locked in patterns of an intricate harmony. The heliotropic center of this novel is desire: desire for the Other; desire for talent; desire to be seen; desire to be held; desire for safety and peace of mind; even the desire to be left alone. Bruce Berger exhibits a sensational knack for imagining lives, real lives lived with triumph and weakness, mental illness and ordered reason, as well as daily flubs and foibles. His skills make for a page turner, with short chapters like etudes that grow increasingly more complicated and frightening, studies in the annals of a family for whom specialness can be a curse; for whom an ordinary day can be a refuge and a gift.”

--David Keplinger, author of The World to Come

"Descriptions of Kayla's responses to her music, as well as her audiences’, were right on track, especially the sense of transport, the departure from her physical surroundings, that she experienced when she played, not just performing in front of an audience, but even in solitary practice by herself.”

               --Don Greenfield, Ph.D., Musicology, Princeton University