Annie initiates an e-mail correspondence with Tucker Crowe, a reclusive Dylanish singer-songwriter, and a connection is forged between two lonely people who are looking for more out of what they've got. What happens when a washed-up musician looks for another chance? And a childless woman looks for a change?

Orphaned sisters Leeann and Mary Beth live in a small town with Leeann attending high school and Mary Beth working two jobs, until Mary Beth's special gift for helping people with their problems uncovers their family's dark secret.

"John Hersey's brilliantly inventive novel is the romantic odyssey of a Stradivarius violin from its creation three hundred years ago in Cremona through its many adventures in the hands of the famous and infamous ... It begins in 1699 as the great Stradivari, in love at fifty-five, fashions a magnificent instrument and names it Antonietta, after the object of his desire. It ends on Martha's Vineyard with a tone-deaf financier purchasing Antonietta...

In this daring first novel of political, sexual, and artistic awakening, a young symphony conductor travels to Germany in the autumn of 1989, where he falls in love with a recent East German defector, and has a brutal encounter with the prewar conductor who becomes his great life teacher. -- From publisher description.