Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die

The men and women in these stories, and perhaps most of all the children, make their own sense of a world where “There are forces at play so simple, natural, and accidental that nobody can figure them out and see them coming.” It is a world, too, in which “there’s lots more sorrow flying around people’s heads than there is joy.” That sorrow may be heartbreaking, occasionally it is horrific; but the reader is constantly reminded, with the quiet, clear-eyed and sometimes mischievous irony of Harriet Richards’ voice, that in this world and – in the least likely places – we may entertain angels unawares.

AUTHOR

Harriet Richards

Harriet Richards has published two books of fiction: The Lavender Child was nominated for the Fiction Award and won First Book Award, Saskatchewan Book Awards 1998; Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die was nominated for the Saskatchewan Book Award Book of the Year in 2003. Her fiction has been featured on CBC Radio, and published in literary journals in Canada and Wales. She lives in Saskatoon.

Reviews

If you believe life is little more than a series of disappointments followed by death then the ten stylistically dazzling stories in Harriet Richardss Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die may well convince you to change your tuneA piano tuner adjusts the instruments strings to ensure it sounds harmonious The same might be said of Richardss talent for creating organically unified short fictions of the first order Judith Fitzgerald The Globe and Mail

While lyrical and affecting there is nothing precious nothing sentimental in this collection Its edgy fiction grounded in the flat and vast Saskatchewan landscape the environments are expansive but the stories dig deepPlanet the Welsh Internationalist