Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die

By Harriet Richards

“There are forces at play so simple, natural, and accidental that nobody can figure them out and see them coming.”

Finalist, Book of the Year, 2003 Saskatchewan Book Awards

In a small prairie town, a teenage girl’s unexpected pregnancy upends her family’s quiet rhythms, revealing the tender absurdities of love and loss. In shadowed ravines and forgotten sheds, a child confronts the rats of her nightmares and the fragile bonds of friendship. A boy chasing turtles and salamanders discovers the razor-thin line between joy and oblivion, while siblings navigate a mother’s surreal transformation amid whispers of art, betrayal, and unspoken curses.

In Waiting for the Piano Tuner to Die, Harriet Richards weaves ten haunting tales of ordinary lives cracked open by the extraordinary—heartaches, spectral visitations, forbidden desires, and the quiet violence of human connection. From a woman’s escape from a controlling lover to a daughter’s reckoning with her mother’s final romance, these stories pulse with dark humour, poignant insight, and the raw poetry of the everyday, exploring the ties that bind—and break—us, in a world in which “there’s lots more sorrow flying around people’s heads than there is joy.”

Even though that sorrow may be heartbreaking, and occasionally horrific, the reader is constantly reminded, with the quiet, clear-eyed, and sometimes mischievous irony of Harriet Richards’s voice, that in this world—in the least likely places—we may entertain angels unawares.