The Book

For fans of Hilary Mantel or GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, the novel ESCAPEMENT is historical fiction with a pedigree: a coming-of-age story about a young girl who will grow up to build pianos for Beethoven.  

When 8-year-old Nannette Stein steps onto a raft to travel down the Danube with her father to Vienna, it launches her on a trajectory of ambition and achievement, constantly tempered by the limitations placed on a girl in a society that was only starting to embrace female emancipation. Nannette’s father is a brilliant instrument-maker and inventor, and Nannette plays on his keyboards and dazzles the Imperial Court; but after she returns home to the family workshop in Augsburg, and moves into adolescence, meeting composers like Mozart and Beethoven along the way, she struggles to figure out what kind of life and career she can realistically hope to have in a world dominated by men. 

The product of extensive original research, ESCAPEMENT will bring classical music to life in a new way for readers as it shows Nannette’s progress through a historical epoch that first emancipates and then represses her — just as the piano escapement she helps to invent makes sound by first freeing a hammer and then restraining it. The book also attempts to reanimate an entire world: repopulating the Classical landscape with the forgotten women who contributed so much to the vitality of the period and the dissemination and endurance of its music.