Piano Angel

by Esther Woolfson

Following the recurrence of a brain tumour, Mark Blum chooses to return to his native Glasgow to die, leaving behind in New York his architectural practice, and bewildered friends and family. The processes of illness oblige Mark to re-assess his life and to re-establish contact with his brother Daniel, a successful photographer.
A legacy of bitterness and jealousy in the brothers’ relationship stems from their friendship as teenagers with a young Hungarian refugee, Anci Goldman. Anci, now a widow, reads of Mark’s death in a newspaper, and finds her feelings of loss inseparable from her own past and history. As she embarks on a commission to illustrate the work of Hans Christian Anderson she revisits her childhood in post-Trianon Hungary, the precarious days of war, and the siege of Budapest in 1945.
As Daniel comes to terms with the aftermath, practical and political, of Mark’s death. Anci, encouraged by her sons, decides to contact him again after forty years of silence…

Esther Woolfson was born in Glasgow. She studied at Edinburgh and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has a degree in Chinese. Her short stories have been broadcast by the BBC and published in many collections. She has received two writers’ bursaries from the Scottish Arts Council. A non-fiction account of living with birds, Corvus, was published by Granta in August 2008.