The Little Pianist is a collection of short stories about love, longing and the lack of love. The children and adults here are looking for a language of their own, in writing or in music: something that will connect them to others and provide some kind of redemption. They face formidable challenges. Art seems to offer the hope of insight and understanding, but its gatekeepers can be implacable; and how do you find love, and live with it, if you have never known it at home? If you venture to leave home, you may discover on your return that you have become a stranger to yourself and those who first knew you.

Vaage’s writing, never less than humanitarian, creates wide open spaces for his characters. His spare, sensitive, rhythmic prose is highly attuned to the ambivalences of human experience and human relationships, acknowledging at one and the same time the sorrow of not having words with which to express oneself, and the surge of joy that comes when a piece of music takes flight.