Ackermann - by Nicolette Polek (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A young woman investigates the disappearance of her beloved piano teacher in the snowy Carpathian mountains.

Exploring love and grief, synthetic biology, music and divinity, Ackermann is a dreamlike literary suspense for readers of Donna Tartt, Fleur Jaeggy, and Marilynne Robinson.

Sasha, a dental assistant in a Carpathian mountain town, has fallen in love with her piano teacher, Ackermann. After seven years of lessons, she thinks she knows him well: his preference for whitefish and duck, his work as an environmental columnist, his place in the yellow chair by the fireplace while she plays. Until one day when, at the appointed time, his chair remains empty, and Ackermann is found shot dead beneath the snow. On Sasha's search for answers, she becomes entangled with a detective, an ice fisherman, a employee of a new biotech lab in the salt mines, and a pastor at the local church, where she discovers Ackermann's final obsession for a Russian composer's unfinished work--one which, once performed, would bring about the end of the world and raise humanity to a new state of consciousness. Ackermann is a thrilling exploration of forgiveness, corruption, and the possibility for transcendence.

Review Quotes

"An exquisite jewel."
--Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

About the Author

Nicolette Polek is the author of Bitter Water Opera (Graywolf, a New Yorker Best Book of 2024) and Imaginary Museums (Soft Skull Press, 2020). She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, and her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, BOMB, New York Tyrant, The Atlantic, Harper's and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of Maryland, and a masters from Yale Divinity School. She is from Northeast Ohio.