The Piano Tuner's Apprentice on the South Side
A Novel of 1970s Chicago

About this book:

In the sweltering summer of 1974, sixteen-year-old Michael Sullivan trades the sticky streets of Chicago's South Side for the cool, felt-lined world of Frank Novak—a blind piano tuner who navigates the city by ear and measures a neighborhood's health by the resonance of its brickwork. What begins as a summer job hauling a canvas tool bag up Stony Island Avenue becomes an education in listening: to the beat frequencies of unison strings, to the groan of a soundboard drinking humidity, to the silent migration of families across block lines, and to the music that persists even when the storefronts close and the "For Sale" signs bloom like weeds.

With prose as precise as a tuning hammer's micro-turn, *The Piano Tuner's Apprentice on the South Side* transforms the craft of piano restoration into a metaphor for holding tension without breaking—eighteen tons of steel wire pressure balanced in a wooden box, a neighborhood in transition, a boy learning that the truest notes are the ones nobody plays aloud. From the sanctuary of a grand Baldwin in a Hyde Park church to the upright in a Woodlawn parlor where the ivories show yellowed teeth, every appointment reveals a city tuning itself toward something new, discordant, and strangely beautiful.

Atmospheric, tender, and sharply observed, this is a novel about the spaces between notes—where mentorship takes root, where history hums beneath the surface, and where a blind man teaches a sighted boy that the world reveals itself not to those who look, but to those who listen.