Hidden in dense forests high in the Romanian mountains, where the winters were especially cold and long, were spruce trees that would be made into pianos: exquisite instruments famous for the warmth of their tone and beloved by the likes of Schumann and Liszt. One man alone knew how to choose them . . . The Weight of a Piano is a tour-de-force about two women and the piano that inexorably ties their lives together through time and across continents. In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life, a Bluthner piano built by a master piano-maker at the turn of the century in Germany. In 2012, in California, twenty-six-year-old Clara Lundy loses another boyfriend and again has to find a new apartment, a situation which is further complicated by the gift her father had given her for her twelfth birthday: a Bluthner piano. The mysterious-and tragic-connections between Katya and Clara unravel gradually yet thrillingly in Chris Cander's powerful novel about attraction, obsession, creative passion, love and loss.