cover image The Piano Teacher

The Piano Teacher

Janice Y. K. Lee, , read by Orlagh Cassidy. . Penguin Audio, $39.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-14-314441-0

Orlagh Cassidy narrates this tale of Hong Kong’s ultra-wealthy Chinese and the British and American expats who share their high life until Japanese occupation in the early 1940s. After the war Claire, the American naïf who joins society through her role as a piano teacher, leaves her husband, is abandoned by her lover and settles into a quiet suburb far from the social whirl. Cassidy handles various accents expertly and has a keen sense of irony, but she is unsuited for more emotionally charged settings—the love scenes hardly seem romantic, and the horror, intrigue and collusion of the occupation period should have been recounted with more drama and less aloofness. A Viking hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 8). (Feb.)