Dissonance: A Novel

When Anna Kramer, a piano teacher in Los Alamos, New Mexico, inherits the journals and scores of composer Hana Weissova, she is mystified by this bequest from a woman she does not know. As Kramer begins to play Weissova's music, however, some of her forgotten emotions resurface. Upon reading the dead woman's journals, which begin in 1945 after Weissova is released from a concentration camp, decades-old secrets that Kramer and her family have kept buried are uncovered.

"Dissonance . . . is bold in its scale, placing us at different eras in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and in the scientific world of Los Alamos, New Mexico. . . . Few contemporary novels challenge the reader's conscience as Dissonance does, and fewer still inspire love so profoundly."--Kevin McIlvoy, author of Hyssop

"A fine, clear, spare novel about music, the mysteries of the past, and the struggle to make meaning out of our present lives. In language that is always melodious, [Lisa] Lenard-Cook writes luminously of Europe and New Mexico, of the years of the last century that were its most brutal and the years at its close that were its most perplexing. Dissonance is a work of beauty."--Russell Martin, author of Picasso's War

Dissonance has been selected for 2004 Durango-La Plata Reads! by the Durango, Colorado, Public Library.