Clara A Novel

The national bestselling "Clara" finds prize-winning novelist Galloway exploring the fertile conflux of love and music in the partnership of Robert and Clara Schumann.

A sweeping tale of love and friendship from the bestselling author of The Piano Maker Clara Herzog is a privileged, intelligent, and thoughtful young woman whose world is changed forever when 1930s Vienna is swept up by the dark prelude of the Second World War. The cavalry officer she married in spite of her family's objections is soon called away to the thick of the conflict, and it falls to Clara, as to so many mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts through the centuries, to stay at home to provide and protect. Through the war, its aftermath, and into the present, Clara must make choices and take risks that are as heroic and life-altering as any that men make in battle. She is an unforgettable character, and this is an unforgettable novel about family bonds and women's deep friendships, about courage and the love that can endure even in unimaginable times.

"Clara mixes social commentary with tender humor. Its lively spontaneity captures a certain segment of humanity in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the turbulent 1950's."--BOOK JACKET.

A novel of World War II follows the adventures of two Canadian sisters who struggle against social convention--one in a small town in Ontario, the other in New York City.

Praise for The Search for Heinrich Schlögel: "Martha Baillie has written a timeless masterpiece. Every page is full of haunting wonderment. Truly, I know of no novel quite like it—it's a blessing. The Search for Heinrich Schlögel has dreamlike locutions, it tells the most unusual tale, and it brings the margins of the world to us with photographic immediacy." —Howard Norman, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder In If Clara, nobody stands on firm ground. Daisy, a writer confined to her home, her leg in a cast from hip to ankle, receives a parcel containing the manuscript of a novel about a Syrian refugee and is asked to pose as its writer. Julia, the curator at the Kleinzahler Gallery, has no idea that her sister, Clara, has written a novel. However, she does know that Clara suffers from a debilitating mental illness, is unpredictable, and lapses easily into hostility. Maurice's life is changed by an art installation involving a pair of binoculars welded to the wall through which visitors are invited to observe passersby outside. An ultralight aircraft's collision with a quiet lawn brings them all together. If Clara explores the emotional weight of friendship, the complexity of family, and people inextricably entwined. Martha Baillie's most recent novel, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel (Tin House), received wide acclaim and was an O Magazine editors' pick. She was lives in Toronto.

A unique bond forms between a twelve-year-old and a Jamaican housekeeper in this moving novel that is “a work of art” (Los Angeles Times). The basis for the beloved film starring Whoopi Goldberg, this prize-winning novel by the author of Nightswimmer and Cloudland charts the profound, rare friendship between a wise woman named Clara and David, a twelve-year-old boy adrift in the wake of a family tragedy and his parents’ broken marriage. As the two grow closer, she brings him into her special world of patois and Jamaican beauty parlors and shadowy alliances, and he comes to realize that in her native country Clara has left behind a mystery, which he grows determined to unveil. Heralded as a classic, Clara’s Heart is at once moving and comical, a tribute to unconventional love, by “a writer in total command of his narrative” (Ian McEwan).

Describes the life of the German pianist and composer who made her professional debut at age nine and who devoted her life to music and to her family.