"Days after Isabel Masurovsky arrives in Italy with her elderly teacher and lover, he dies in their hotel room, leaving her stranded. A broken-down former prodigy cellist, Isabel is the daughter of a world-renowned pianist who survived the Czech concentration camp Theresienstadt.".

"The extreme survival prescriptions her father instilled continue to ring in her ear, and she has been frozen and unable to perform since his death. But she bluffs her way into a job teaching the tone-deaf son of a shady miser millionaire. Soon she discovers the instrument his father is hiding, a legendary cello that was confiscated by the Nazis and never resurfaced.".

"Isabel secretly takes the cello to play at her teacher's funeral. As she is wandering the streets afterward, lost, she meets a cagey surgical resident with past complications of his own. A compulsive performer and liar, he turns out to be more genuine than anyone Isabel has ever known. Slowly, relentlessly, he unravels Isabel's disturbance and dares her to play the cello she is destined to play, to live not in her father's time but in her own."--BOOK JACKET.