Q&A With Sarah Landenwich

I’m so excited to be doing this Q&A with Sarah Landenwich whose debut novel The Fire Concerto, will be available to read on June 10^th! 

Q: Sarah, would you like to give a brief description of The Fire Concerto? 

A: The Fire Concerto is a story about a brilliant female musician lost to history and another woman’s quest to ensure she is not forgotten. The book follows a woman named Clara Bishop, a former concert pianist who gave up music when her hand and arm were badly burned in a fire. She’s working as a bartender in Austin, Texas, when her piano teacher dies, leaving Clara an unexpected inheritance: an ornate nineteenth-century metronome with a cryptic message hidden within its box. Clara soon comes to suspect that this unusual bequest is the long-lost metronome of the composer Aleksander Starza, a priceless object missing since 1885, when Starza was murdered by one of his pupils, a prodigiously talented woman alleged to have been insane. 

Clara doesn’t know how her teacher came to possess this metronome or why the teacher gave it to Clara. These questions spur her on a journey to Warsaw, where Starza lived and died, to uncover the truth about what really happened the night of his death. 

Q: How long did it take you to write The Fire Concerto? Are there any strong lessons and emotions that you hope readers will feel once they turn the final page?

A: I wrote the first draft of this novel very quickly, probably in about four months. The subsequent drafts took much longer. All told, it took about three years to reach the version that was more or less the final draft. There were additional stints of editing over the next year or so, first to make revisions my agent suggested and later to make revisions for my editor. But the bulk of this book was written from 2019-2022.

As for how I want readers to feel at the end of the book, my deepest hope is that they leave the final page satisfied with the reading experience. It takes a long time to read a book, and I want people to feel that the investment they made was worth their while. I also want them to come away with a sense of the novel’s underlying theme, which is that hope can be found within hardship and even tragedy. At its heart, The Fire Concerto is a book about lost dreams and how we find our way to a good life when the life we wanted didn’t work out the way we’d planned. 

Q: Can you reveal anything about book two or is it too early to give away any details at this time?

A: I’m underway on a dual-timeline novel set-in rural Indiana in 1881 and 2022. It has nothing to do with music. In fact, I don’t think there’s so much as a song on the radio in the whole draft! But I will say that a story I stumbled across when researching The Fire Concerto was the spark of inspiration for this next one. 

Q: If The Fire Concerto were to become a movie or tv series, who would be your dream cast to play the characters within the novel?

A: This question is so tough for me! When I write characters, I don’t visualize them in full detail. I think of them more in terms of an essence comprised of their primary physical and personality traits. Of course, I provide a visual description that gives a general sense of what a character looks like, but most of the physical details I reveal are in the service of developing their character rather than their physical being. For instance, I describe my protagonist Clara’s hair as being “a nondescript ash blonde she wore in a high ponytail, with blunt bangs she cut herself.” This is a visual description, yes, but the real work it’s doing is conveying information about who Clara is–someone who doesn’t make a lot of fuss about her appearance. When I read works of fiction, I similarly don’t picture characters in concrete detail. Do other people? I’m so curious! I’m going to start asking!

To address your question, though, if I were going to cast an actor whose appearance most closely resembles what I think Clara looks like, it would be Perry Mattfeld. For Constantia Pleyel, the star of the nineteenth-century plot of this book, I imagine an actor that can convey great passion and great intelligence at the same time, like Marion Cotillard. Matthew Goode would make a wonderful Starza, and Imelda Staunton would be fabulous in the role of Clara’s formidable piano teacher, Madame.