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An act of desperation divides a mother and her child. Only an act of faith can reunite them. Trudy Hulst has no idea if her husband survived his attempted escape through the Berlin Wall. But she knows too well the consequence of his actions. Branded as the wife of a defector, she faces life in an East Berlin prison, leaving her baby without a mother or father. To protect her child she must abandon him – then fight history and politics to gain his freedom. See a brief video about the background of this novel. Read an excerpt from the first chapter.
All parents fear the midnight phone call saying their child has been in a car crash. When a local hospital ran a television commercial about a young accident victim whose heart was donated to save another man’s life, I felt enormous sympathy for the teen’s mother. The commercial pictured her laying her hand on the recipient’s chest, where her son’s heart still beat. I couldn’t watch it without crying. The final seconds of the commercial showed the heart recipient’s name and hometown. I wondered how it felt to receive a stranger’s heart. Did he experience survivor’s guilt? Did he want to know about the young man whose heart still beats inside him? I traced down his phone number and asked if he would talk to me. Jim and his wife graciously invited me to their home. Jim is six-foot-four, a gentle giant of a man. He could hardly talk about his transplant without choking up. Luckily his wife could – and she’d been with him through everything. After that I arranged to meet the donor’s mother. In the throes of fresh grief, how had she found the courage to let the doctors take her son’s still-warm heart? I also talked with other recipients, donor families, and support groups. What I found was courage that transcended tragedy. By restoring hope where hope was gone, organ donation grants life in unimaginable ways – not only to recipients, but to loved ones left behind. The Piano Man is about a mother who, after three years, has not coped with the sudden loss of her teenaged son. She sets out, without going through approved channels, to find the recipient of her son's heart, and finds him smoking, drinking, and wasting his life. In trying to save his life against his will, she eventually saves her own.
As a child, Bobbie Lee found refuge from her lonely life at her best friend's house. Rockhaven was a place of magic that clung to a wooded hill above the Columbia River. Her friend's mother, Lenora, was a lepidopterist, and their glass-walled sun porch harbored a kaleidoscope of bright wings. Here, with Cincy and Lenora, Bobbie found love and the family she longed for. Their friendship was her compass through the trials of adolescence. But when the tangled intimacies between them began to unravel, Rockhaven became a place of unspeakable tragedy. A decade later, the long shadows of that night continue to haunt Bobbie, despite her attempts to hide from the past. Then a stranger from the past arrives at her doorstep. Only by confronting the dark secret at the heart of the tragedy can she find hope and redemption.
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