Pulling All the Stops

About this book:

Two virtuoso pianists. One ruined organ. A summer that will either destroy them or make them whole.

Leo Sterling plays like he's building a cathedral: every note calculated, every phrase architecturally perfect. Julian Morales plays like he's burning one down: reckless, incandescent, alive. They've hated each other since they were eleven. When the Van Dam International Piano Competition ends in a historic deadlock, the jury's eccentric chairman offers a verdict neither expected: spend the summer restoring a 1888 Hook & Hastings pipe organ in an abandoned Hudson Valley church. Three manuals. Forty-six ranks. Three decades of silence, swallow nests, and desiccated leather. No Carnegie debut. No recording contract. Just two rival prodigies, a crate of hide glue, and a machine that demands they breathe as one.

In the sweltering dark of St. Jude's, amid tracker rods like matchsticks and bellows that breathe like dying things, Leo and Julian must resurrect a voice neither has ever commanded. What begins as a battle of wills—over stopped pipes and broken springs, over class and privilege, over who deserves the prize—becomes something far more dangerous: a duet. Because the organ doesn't care about technique. It only sings when you stop playing at it and start listening to it. And in a space where every mistake hangs for five seconds in the rafters, the only way out is through each other.