The Prague Sonata

Bradford Morrow's novel interweaves music history with twentieth-century political upheaval. The story centers on Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose piano career ended due to injury. She receives pages of a worn sonata manuscript from a Czech immigrant in Queens, along with a request to find its true owner—a Prague friend the woman lost contact with during the Second World War—and to locate the remaining movements. Meta travels from New York to Prague to investigate the manuscript's origins and uncover the story behind it. The novel spans decades of Prague's history, from the First World War through the Velvet Revolution, and moves between postwar London and immigrant America. As Meta searches for the sonata's secrets, she discovers others are also pursuing the music for their own reasons. Morrow, who received the Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, spent more than a dozen years writing this work. The novel explores how individual lives become connected through music and historical events.