Content Warning: This section describes pedophilia.

“Everyone is dead,” the novel starts before the novel flashes back in time to explain what has happened. Using the metaphor of a photo album, the unidentified narrator introduces the setting and then each of the principal characters by capturing each in a photo. Only Kathleen is not pictured: All but one of her photos are destroyed, and Kathleen now sings in heaven.

James Piper was raised in Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada, by a loving mother who dreamed her son would not waste his life working in the local coal mines. She taught him to play piano and to love music. His father, a shoemaker, was abusive toward James’s mother. Because she loved the piano, one day he took a hammer to the instrument. James, determined to help his mother, taught himself how to rebuild the piano, becoming a piano tuner in the process. In 1897, when he is old enough to leave home, James heads to the island’s biggest city, Sydney, certain there were lots of pianos there.