Ten years after the book’s opening, the piano teacher of the title, Claire Pendleton, arrives in the city and begins working for the Chens, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent families. The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox. She spoke to us from Atlanta, where she was promoting her book. “I was looking for something to expand into a novel, and was the first thing that could be expanded into something larger,” Lee says. That short story eventually served as the basis of the first chapter. Lee read books and researched newspaper articles of the WWII era, focusing on the minutiae of everyday life from transportation logistics to hairstyles. The book originally began as a short story set in the 1970s, but Lee began reading about World War II, and the story evolved from there. In short, Lee’s fiction is so cinematic that one is surprised that the movie rights have not been snapped up. The Piano Teacher (not to be confused with another book of that title, the most famous one by 2004 Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek) also has echoes of Lust, Caution, the 2007 Ang Lee film about sex and espionage in WWII Hong Kong. While that analogy might be a lot for a first-time novelist to live up to, Lee’s tale does share with Ian McEwan’s bestseller a WWII setting and a key plot point of a character’s tragic mistake. Lee’s debut novel The Piano Teacher contains a review blurb that compares the work to Atonement. As she begins to understand the true nature of the world she has entered, and long-buried secrets start to emerge, Claire learns that sometimes the price of survival is love.The book jacket for Janice Y.K.

At one of its elegant cocktail parties, she meets Will, to whom she is instantly attracted-but as their affair intensifies, Claire discovers that Will's enigmatic persona hides a devastating past. A provincial English newlywed, Claire is seduced by the heady social life of the expatriate community. Ten years later, Claire Pendleton comes to Hong Kong and is hired by the wealthy Chen family as their daughter's piano teacher. Meanwhile, Trudy remains outside, forced to form dangerous alliances with the Japanese-in particular, the malevolent head of the gendarmerie, whose desperate attempts to locate a priceless collection of Chinese art lead to a chain of terrible betrayals. Will is sent to an internment camp, where he and other foreigners struggle daily for survival. But their love affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. In the sweeping tradition of 'The English Patient,' a gripping tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong Kong In 1942, Will Truesdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong, falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite.

The piano teacher lee