Nina’s Tempo

Nina’s Tempo does for classical music
what Mona’s Eyes did for painting.

Nina is fourteen—the age when you begin questioning everything, especially your parents.

While her father, an internationally renowned concert pianist, spends his life traveling between concert halls, trains and anonymous hotel rooms, Nina is growing up without him. Whip-smart and fiercely independent, she sees the world with a clarity that leaves little room for sentiment—or for the music that has defined her father’s life.

To Nina, classical music is elitist. Museum music. Written by dead people for almost-dead people.

One evening, she finally says it out loud. Classical music is over.

What begins as a provocation becomes the start of an unexpected journey. Determined to prove each other wrong, father and daughter embark on a series of conversations—and discoveries—that slowly dismantle their certainties.

Through the music of Rachmaninov, Schubert, Vivaldi and Berlioz—and with the irrepressible help of Nina’s beloved Aunt Plume—they explore creativity and ambition, beauty and doubt, inheritance and identity. Most of all, they learn how music can become the language that allows two people to find each other again.

Nina’s Tempo becomes a moving meditation on the fragile bond between parent and child—persisting even as life threatens to pull them apart—and on the precious time we have together.

Luminous, witty and deeply affecting, Nina’s Tempo is a coming-of-age novel that reminds us why great works of art never truly belong to the past: they continue to help us understand ourselves—and one another—across generations.

A novel that will change the way you listen to classical music…